The late 20th century technological and industrial efficiencies have resulted in an integrated global environment where R&D, manufacturing, distribution, finance, and sales can maximize regional efficiencies and productivity. This “tightly integrated global market” offers significant advantages to manufacturers of all types with an enormous customer base and a product development infrastructure which allows management teams to quickly adjust global resources based on market requirements and regional capabilities. Clearly, real-time worldwide asset management would not be possible without advanced technologies and, together with resource management opportunities, R&D and manufacturing organizations have the greatest potential for significant improvement in productivity. However, since this environment has taken the overall efficiency of global product development to a level of ultra-efficiency, great pressures have been placed on R&D teams to maximize their productivity.

To manage these economic and productivity pressures, scientific R&D organizations are re-evaluating the processes and tools they rely on to get their work done more efficiently. In drug discovery and development, for example, companies can now spend over $1 billion and 10 years to bring a new drug into the market1. In the recent past, a common way to decrease drug development R&D costs was to use inexpensive mass-marketed technologies wherever possible. In the field of high-performance computing, this resulted in a focus on “microprocessor performance” and large clusters built by connecting off-the-shelf computers with high performance networks. While this strategy has proven very successful for some workloads, many organizations now realize that to truly improve the product development process and their global competitiveness, they need a comprehensive computing solution in which the appropriate microprocessors are combined with a high performance system infrastructure and tuned software.

 

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