Intel in the Life Sciences Industry

Backgrounder

Second Quarter 2004

Intel in the Life Sciences Industry

Biology + Technology = Real World Solutions

Life Science is an adolescent industry that is maturing and expanding with breathtaking speed from its origin at the confluence of biology and high technology. The rush of discoveries that are illuminating the links from DNA to genes, proteins and metabolic processes constitutes one of the great revolutions in human history. Scientists, capital and entrepreneurs are flooding the field in pursuit of new medicines, foods, materials and crops.

To understand the pace and urgency of investment, consider just one fact of life in the pharmaceuticals industry: in the US it currently takes twelve years and $800 million to bring a new drug to market. If advances in computational bioscience and improvements in enterprise business processes can transform life sciences by reducing cost and accelerating the pace of new product introduction by taking the paper out of drug development, the returns on investment will be formidable.

Intel’s Focus in Life Science

Intel’s involvement in the Life Science industry is concentrated in three fields:

Basic Science, which includes research investigations into the composition, structure and operation of biological systems. Intense activity is currently focused on the genetic composition of living organisms (genomics), the proteins encoded by genes (proteomics), and the organic expression of protein function (phenomics).
Biotechnology companies which develop processes and technologies that support new product discovery and production.
Pharmaceutical companies which apply life science technologies to research, design and produce new medicines. Not surprisingly, these are the largest money-makers in the field.

A Common Dependence on Computation

What these fields share is a deep reliance on computational techniques and infrastructure to store, manage and process vast amounts of data. The automation of research labs on an industrial scale has dramatically increased the rate of new data production, while new database and Web technologies have expanded the scope and nature of available data sources. Life Science research is now inseparable from large-scale data management, analysis and numerical modeling. Growth in the field will inevitably be accompanied by increased demand for IT infrastructure products.

According to IDC research, spending in the sector for high-performance computing systems grew by 107 percent in 1998-9, 165 percent in 1999-2000, and 31 percent in 2000-2001[1]. IDC estimates that by 2005, nearly one third of all processors sold for HPC applications will go into the life sciences[2]. Total spending for bioscience IT is forecast to increase at a 24 percent CAGR through 2006[3].

Intel Is Inside Life Sciences

As the leading supplier of open standards-based building blocks for technical and scientific computing, Intel provides the life sciences industry with high-performance processing platforms to match their escalating requirements. Through its unprecedented investment in R&D and new manufacturing processes (nearly US $20 billion in 2001-2002), Intel has pushed the raw performance of its microprocessors. By combining that raw processing power with the economics of volume manufacturing, Intel delivers a complete technology platform for cost-effective computing and communications. That platform in turn provides the basis for industry-wide innovation, including two developments of particular significance to the Life Sciences:

New innovations in high-performance computing and distributed processing that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of technical computing resources
One Generation Ahead (OGA) solutions that combine best practices, people, and service oriented application design with distributed IT architectures to transform business workflows, automate manual paper-based processes, accelerate operations and reduce costs.

To ensure the availability of high-quality hardware and software solutions powered by Intel processing platforms, Intel has also created a Life Science solutions team headed by senior technologists from its High Performance Computing development group. Using industry expertise and Intel resources to understand the business and technical needs of life science companies, the team engages leading hardware vendors, software developers and system integrators to create and market targeted technology solutions built on Intel architecture. These efforts are currently focused on three high-priority solution areas.

Life Science Information Managementsolutions are systems that manage the capture and aggregation of data from the source to the database. Typical examples that illustrate the vast range of solution scales might include:

A network of wireless PDAs or tablet PCs for point-of-care collection of clinical trial data by participating physicians, or to streamline sales presentations by sales representatives in the field

A laboratory network of desktop PCs and servers for collecting and consolidating the output from dozens of automated gene sequencing machines

A national health data grid for collecting and storing comprehensive, life-long electronic medical histories of all citizens.

Challenges in this area include the difficult problem of integrating data from diverse sources and mining data sets that will soon exceed a petabyte of information.

Bioinformatics solutions search and analyze large, complex data sets to extract knowledge and find significant patterns. The unprecedented size of the data volumes in question mean that advanced machine-learning technologies are required to support these solutions.

Biosimulation solutions provide in silica evaluation of promising drug candidates in simulated biological environments—a numerical model of an E. coli cell, for instance. These are high-performance computing applications typically run on large clusters.

Scalable Power from the Wireless Device to the Database Server

What these solutions share is a highly agile IT infrastructure designed to take maximum advantage of distributed data, multiple access points and technologies, and scalable computing power. Most include a wide assortment of host systems ranging from enterprise database and application servers through high performance clusters, scalable edge servers, powerful desktops and thin and light notebook PCs to versatile handheld wireless devices. Building applications to operate efficiently in these environments requires a powerful and open standards-based technology platform—one that enables flexible, cost-effective capacity scaling across a globally distributed compute model. This is just the kind of platform available from Intel computing and communication products.

Intel Building Blocks for Life Science Solutions Include:

Enterprise Servers: The Intel® Itanium® family of processors for the largest 64-bit enterprise application and database service, high performance computing and data aggregation

Application Servers: Intel XeonTM DP servers for dual-processor departmental and communication servers, and Intel Xeon MP multi-processor servers for up to 32-way enterprise application and database servers
Desktop PCs: Intel Pentium® 4 processors with Hyper-Threading Technology[4] for powerful desktops
Tablet PCs and Laptops: Intel CentrinoTM [5] mobile technology for greater freedom and productivity in mobile computing, longer battery life and innovative usage applications.
Networking and Communications: Intel Internet Exchange Architecture (IXA) network processors with Intel XScaleTM technology for high-speed networking and communications systems
Handheld and Wireless Devices: Intel Personal Internet Client Architecture (Intel PCA) application processors with Intel XScaletechnology for PDAs, cellular phones and other handheld wireless devices

Software and Services for Solution Support

Intel Solution Services – Intel also enables new Life Science solutions through engineering consultation and support services designed to let developers and enterprise customers work directly with Intel experts. Intel Solution Services is a global consulting organization that applies Intel Corporation’s technical knowledge base—and a worldwide network of Intel Solution Centers—to optimize the performance of applications and solutions based on Intel architecture and communication technologies.

Intel Software and Developer Tools– Intel also supports developers with a complete selection of compilers, performance libraries and application analyzers designed to simplify development and ensure optimum code execution on all Intel processors, including the latest and most powerful Itanium architecture.

Success Stories and Milestones

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory recently commissioned a 950-node HPC cluster of dual-processor Hewlett-Packard rx2600 servers powered by 1900 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. Purchased to replace an aging IBM supercomputer in basic research applications that include computational biology, genomics and proteomics, the new facility provides theoretical peak performance in the range of 11.4 teraflops, and has doubled the number of users that can be supported concurrently.

Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical leader, has linked 2,700 of its researchers’ PCs in a high-performance grid that provides an extra 5+ teraflops of compute power for drug research. United Devices Grid MP Enterprise* software and Hewlett-Packard Proliant* servers powered by dual Intel® Xeon TM processors were used to implement and manage the solution. The economic and operational gains were a key factor in the company’s decision to upgrade 65,000 PCs during 2003, standardizing on Hewlett-Packard machines powered by Intel® Pentium® 4 processors and Windows XP. The new machines will dramatically expand the potential scope of the company’s PC grid.

A consortium of Norwegian universitieshas recently consolidated their technical computing resources in an HPC grid powered in part by Intel Itanium processors. The NOTUR grid allows participants to exploit the clustering capabilities of Linux, the performance of HP-UX, and the familiarity of Windows XP. The concentration of processing power greatly improves the execution of compute-intensive applications such as genome database search algorithms.

The Vital IT project in Switzerland is a collaboration between Intel, Hewlett-Packard and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). With a 64-CPU Hewlett Packard Integrity* server cluster powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors, the center provides state-of-the-art infrastructure for a distributed community of academic partners. SIB, HP and Intel are collaborating to port key bioinformatics applications and optimize them for the Itanium 2 microarchitecture.

About Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is the world’s leading supplier of advanced microprocessors used inside PCs, servers and wireless devices, and a leading manufacturer of communication and networking products. The company is a driving force behind the PC and Internet revolutions that have transformed business and society. Founded in 1968, Intel created the first microprocessor in 1971, and today supplies the computing and communication industries with the chips, boards, systems and software building blocks that power computers, servers, communication systems and networks. Intel’s mission is to be the preeminent building block supplier to the Internet economy.

For More Information

For more information about Intel Corporation and its role in enabling powerful distributed solutions for the Life Sciences industry, please visit: intel.com/go/life_sciences.

For Press only: Orietta Sutherberry, Intel Press Relations (Europe), +44 (0)1793 403426 or email:

Erica Fields, Intel Press Relations (USA), 503-264-7706, or email: .

*Other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

[1]Technical Computing in the Biosciences: Quantitative Survey Report, IDC, February 2002

[2] Technical Computing in the Biosciences: Quantitative Survey Report, IDC, February 2002

[3]Bio-IT Infrastructure Market Forecast, 2001-2006, IDC, February 2002

[4] Hyper-Threading Technology requires a computer system with an Intel® Pentium® 4 processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology, a chipset and BIOS that utilize this technology, and an operating system that includes optimizations for this technology. Performance will vary depending on the specific hardware and software you use.

[5] Wireless connectivity and some features may require you to purchase additional software, services or external hardware. Availability of public wireless LAN access points limited. System performance measured by MobileMark* 2002. System performance, battery life, wireless performance and functionality will vary depending on your specific hardware and software configurations.