LABORATORY INFORMATICS


”Maintaining an in- house team is a luxury, and outsourcing offers a way to benefit from the advantages that computational methods deliver without committing to a significant investment”


Fixing a research computing environment Rainer also gave a practical example based on the company CelGene which has now been acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb. The company had already developed its own computing environment for scientific research but found that it did not meet the requirements of its researchers upon completion. ‘CelGene was growing rather quickly and they were in a state of change. They were acquiring a lot of companies and leadership decided that it was going too fast and they needed to determine some parameters and take control,’ stated Rainer. ‘There were many demands placed upon them from the business but the one that stood out was the need for a scientific computing environment.’ ‘Corporate realised that if they were


‘Typically we would meet with a


customer, they would outline the requirements for a project or a set of projects. We would deliver with them a proposal in the form of a statement of work which outlines their requirements, our deliverables, pricing and finite times scales,’ said Rainer. ‘The key is with a managed services model you effectively have one person who is the key point of contact. Behind the scenes there are a lot of very experienced individuals doing the work.’


‘Scientists are paid to do science and


research – they are not paid to manage scientific computing resources. We focus on what we do really well and that allows them to focus on what they do really well,’ Rainer added.


Changing requirements While there are similarities in the goals and challenges that these organisations face the technologies, software and implementation models they choose can be vastly different, which means that RCH is constantly adapting to meet new challenges and driver RCE’s, which can support scientific innovation.


www.scientific-computing.com | @scwmagazine ‘The interesting thing with this job is


there really isn’t too much that is typical,’ notes Eschallier. ‘Everyday brings a new set of challenges and the type of people that we hire really embrace. They are not the kind of people that use standard operating procedures, that like to rinse and repeat problems.’ ‘We will get involved with anything


based on: computing at scale, specalised applications, HPC, leveraging public cloud, curating data, analytics, mining, driving ML/DL,’ Eschallier continued. ‘Each customer has a similar problem, “I need to find a target, synthesise it and move it forward and look for things like toxicity and efficacy”. ‘But how they do it and the technologies


they want to use and the processes they want to follow are all different,’ he stressed.


‘Sometimes they want a holistic, cradle


to grave approach and other times customers will say I just need you to do these three niche items. ‘It is about standing up software, making


data available and performance tuning is a growing requirement,’ Eschallier concluded.


going to succeed collectively they required a platform that would allow them to scientific computing, share data and collaborate,’ he continued. ‘Effectively they built this RCE, opened up shop and nobody came. When they investigated why, the feedback that they got was not very positive. It was largely based on the fact that this RCE was not built with researchers in mind. It was designed with good intentions but it was designed around IT. At this point RCH was allowed to come


and investigate and recommend how this might be fixed. After working with CelGene and investigating the challenges and solutions they helped the company redefine the RCE to better suit the researcher and scientists. ‘We happened to be very fortunate at the time that we arrived,’ notes Rainer. ‘We were asked by the chief architect of this platform to come in and evaluate it. We respectfully and constructively pointed out some things that needed to be changed and they embraced most of what we had to say and redesigned this platform with them. We worked with them and brought the teams together to redesign this RCE and deployed it,’ Rainer concluded.


Spring 2020 Scientific Computing World 27


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