Case Study: Celgene cuts HPC processing from months to hours and enables secure, scalable collaboration with Amazon Web Services

Celgene - Customer Case Study

Celgene, a New Jersey–based biopharmaceutical company developing cancer and inflammatory-disease therapies, faced an IT bottleneck: its on‑premises high‑performance computing (HPC) clusters were limited to a few hundred cores, forcing computational jobs to take weeks or months. That constrained researchers’ ability to run large genomic workloads, prevented agile, secure collaboration with academic partners (raising IP and data‑loss concerns), and lacked the scalability needed for modern drug discovery.

Celgene moved its HPC to AWS, using Amazon EC2 for compute, S3/Glacier for large genomic storage, and VPC, IAM, and Direct Connect to provide isolated, secure, self‑provisioned environments with IT controls. The change cut HPC job times from weeks to hours, unlocked far greater experimentation and collaboration with external labs, and enabled on‑demand scaling from hundreds to thousands of nodes—accelerating research and expanding cloud adoption across the company.

Celgene

Lance Smith

Associate Director of IT