AstraZeneca has chosen Platform Computing's Platform LSF to create and manage three heterogeneous large-scale compute farms within its Discovery Function. The computing power of these farms, located on sites in England and Sweden, will be used by AstraZeneca's research and development teams around the world to support one of the best research and development pipelines in the life sciences industry, maximising the company's investment in hardware and software.

AstraZeneca will use Platform LSF on three heterogeneous compute farms, two in England and one in Sweden, to provide the computing power needed to accelerate drug discovery, design and time to market. These sites include:

* Alderley Park, Cheshire, UK: AstraZeneca's Enabling Science and Technology department has invested in 130 Platform LSF licences to manage its compute farm, consisting of 110 IBM Linux servers and 8 SGI IRIX servers. The computing power created by this farm is used for chemo-informatics, molecular modelling and accelerating high throughput structure-based drug discovery and design.

* Blackley, UK: The Discovery Information Systems department near Manchester runs a compute farm consisting of 204 Compaq ES40 servers, with over 200 Platform LSF licences. AstraZeneca sites all over the world use the compute power provided for bio-informatics.

* Molndal, Sweden: AstraZeneca R&D site, near to Gothenburg, has a SGI IRIX server farm that provides compute power for computational chemistry, docking and screening to a team of over 200 scientists.

Platform LSF is a workload management solution that optimises the use of enterprise-wide computing resources by controlling and co-ordinating computing jobs across multiple geographic locations. It addresses the high-throughput computational requirements of modern life sciences computing environments by providing transparent and on demand access to valuable computing resources. From a single cluster of Linux compute farms, to Microsoft Windows desktops or worldwide Grids of distributed computing systems, Platform LSF delivers consistent performance and scalability in distributing applications and executing workload.

Life sciences organisations around the world utilise Platform's distributed computing solutions in the discovery process to maximise the productivity and potential of their existing technology investments. Platform seamlessly integrates with and distributes application workload, allowing scientists to exploit and analyse diverse types and sources of biological data in a shorter period of time, deliver more accurate results to reduce failure rates and enable better decision-making earlier in the discovery process.