Case Study: Metabiota runs millions of pandemic simulations faster with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rescale

Metabiota - Customer Case Study

Metabiota is an infectious-disease risk analytics company that builds probabilistic models from hundreds of data sources to estimate human and financial losses from epidemics. Their work requires running tens of millions of simulations and collaborating with university partners using proprietary C++ and R code, but managing the HPC infrastructure on AWS, scaling runs, and diagnosing errors consumed research time and created costly delays.

Metabiota moved its workloads to Rescale’s ScaleX platform on AWS, which integrated proprietary code, orchestrated jobs via S3/SQS/EC2 and Docker, and leveraged EC2 Spot Instances for cost savings. Rescale enabled Metabiota to scale from thousands to millions of runs (their influenza catalog required 18 million simulations, ~90,000 compute hours and 100 TB of data), speed error identification and re‑execution, shorten project timelines from months to days or weeks, and reduce compute costs by roughly 60–70%, letting the team focus on model development.

Metabiota

Mike Gahan

Senior Data Scientist