Case Study: City of Hope speeds lifesaving drug development with Microsoft Corporation Azure cloud GPUs

Scientists use the cloud to speed the development of lifesaving drugs

City of Hope, a large U.S. health provider and research center, needed far more compute power to model disease at the molecular level and speed drug discovery for cancer and diabetes. Using Microsoft Corporation’s Azure platform, including Azure Virtual Machines and Azure ExpressRoute, the team sought a cost-effective way to expand its high-performance computing resources beyond its in-house clusters.

Microsoft Corporation helped City of Hope deploy a GPU-powered Azure environment with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, a private Azure Virtual Network, and Linux-based scientific software. The new setup was running in just a few days and reduced protein-modeling simulations from weeks or a month to days, giving researchers faster results and accelerating progress toward lifesaving drugs.

City of Hope

Allen Mao

Staff Scientist, Computational Therapeutics Core, Beckman Research Institute