Case Study: City of Hope achieves faster drug-discovery simulations with Microsoft Azure

Scientists use the cloud to speed the development of lifesaving drugs

City of Hope, a leading U.S. research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes, and other diseases, needed far more compute power to model dynamic 3D protein structures for personalized drug discovery. Its in‑house HPC clusters were CPU‑bound, procurement delays diverted scientists from research, and the team required GPU acceleration to screen millions of molecules faster.

By extending its cluster to Microsoft Azure using N‑Series Virtual Machines with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs (32 NC12 instances on a private Virtual Network connected via ExpressRoute), the team deployed its Linux stack in days and ran GROMACS/NAMD at scale. Simulations that took weeks or a month on CPUs now complete in days, accelerating drug development, shifting costs from capital to operational, and providing elastic capacity for continuous and burst workloads.

City of Hope

Allen Mao

Staff Scientist, Computational Therapeutics Core, Beckman Research Institute