InhibOx has collaboration with Scopius, owning a virtual library of modelled drugs. They provide their customers with personalized searching techniques in the field of biotech and agrochemicals. The company has vast data sets. This is the reason why they require a wide range of computation power as well as storage. Another high demand of the company was to devise a solution that has high embedded data security. Obviously, every business need their solution to be economical and beneficial, so cost was also a main demand for the solution. For this reason, they opt for the product which is considered inexpensive and highly scalable.

Paul Davie, CEO of InhibOx, describes: “The reliable availability of effectively unlimited computing power is critical to our business model, and AWS has proved faultless in delivering this, with a very high level of customer service. Secondly, AWS provides the highest levels of data security, a critical factor for us and our clients”.

There are a wide variety of products which are available for different scenarios. After researching all the technologies, they opted for Amazon EC2 and Amazon simple storage services for their work. Along with these products, they also used ec2 spot instances in order to perform high performance computing. After much research, they selected the cc2.8xlarge instance which proved to be a great success. This architecture was for the purpose of computing pre-calculated 3D structures and properties which were all built on the Scopius format database.

Utilizing this architecture, they were able to provide high computation throughput. Other products are mentioned in the description given by Paul Davie, “We developed our own proprietary software that used a wide variety of software on Ubuntu, including bash, Python, and C++. Our cloud infrastructure was built on MIT StarCluster, S3tools, and AWS Import/Export. StarCluster was a great help in replicating on the cloud the kind of computational infrastructure we normally use internally. Amazon CloudWatch proved particularly useful. Amazon S3 tools helped to store our input files and backup our computational output. AWS Import/Export was used to set up and manage the transfer of our results to our customer”.

InhibOx integrated all the architectures and were able to gain the major security advantages they required. First of all they gained the advantage of money. If they had built this architecture in their own premises, they would have incurred a cost of $192K. As they opted for AWS, they were able to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was a great saving which they can spend on any other business improving model. Apart from that, it also posed a great advantage of simplicity of integration and deployment. Dr Morris notes, “We found that there is now a wealth of open source tools that have matured to the point where it is much easier to launch and use a computational cluster on AWS than just a year ago. Not only that, but AWS provides access to a scale of resources that permits the construction of systems that rival the performance of the top 500 supercomputers, with the availability of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, for a tiny fraction of the cost.”

InhibOx really appreciates that they depend on AWS because the elasticity and optimization provided by AWS is considered amazing, such that a big enterprise can really depend on them for their architectural and technological needs for security. This is due to the fact that the products have given them reliability and availability. They can scale up to whatever level they want. InhibOx is expanding in larger dimensions and their authorities prefer AWS for their bigger ventures. This is a good sign for both partners for working together and increasing their workspaces.