‘Fujitsu aims to differentiate through its application knowledge’

Many big IT companies are operational in India and High Performance Computing (HPC) may not be the new concept in the Indian pharmaceutical market. What is the USP of your HPC services?

Mehul Doshi

At the high-end HPC market Fujitsu aims to differentiate through our application knowledge and service capability. Upstream, this translates into a higher quality and more thorough benchmarking process, and an endeavour to more clearly understand the client’s problems from a real application perspective.

Taking this approach into the small to mid-size HPC market our USP translates into an approach for capturing and encoding this same global application knowledge and customer insight, combined with a mechanism to effortlessly disseminate such expertise on a broad scale.

Explain the idea behind ‘Fujitsu HPC Simplicity’.

HPC Simplicity provides the key by leveraging our own software stack – specifically the HPC Gateway web environment. We encode HPC methods and best-practices that can then be scaled to the largest number of individuals and teams, whether practiced users or HPC newcomers. Simplifying the HPC interface alone is not the complete answer. Without the expert-based means to drive applications and HPC workloads effectively, the range of users will always remain limited and narrow, regardless how easy the desktop interface appears. In fact our message combines simplicity and expertise. Again, expertise that can only be re-used by the expert or near-expert doesn’t widen the appeal and opportunity of HPC. These concepts only work in conjunction and Fujitsu is the only vendor today driving this discourse and engagement at the application level, rather than just at the infrastructure and system layer.

What are the applications of this concept in the pharma industry? What are the revenue savings and how soon can the client see ROI?

There are two areas where we target ROI. The first is the time to achieve near peak productivity. The combination of simplified user experience and optimal application methods aims helps to reduce this to a minimum. Sustaining maximum productivity then gives the bulk of the return. This is delivered through methods that are continually enriched by Fujitsu with learning acquired from its interactions with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), end-users and other researchers, and by the additions of the customer themselves. This takes the form of further application self-on boarding and automation of standardised processes that are potentially unique to that organisation, that capture their own core competence, and which are spread more effectively across the widest set of their end-users. Ideally this gives the customer confidence and assurance to deploy HPC on more projects.

What implementation challenges do you foresee?

The biggest challenge in the pharma industry is potentially the large range of applications that are regularly utilised across the different customers. More so than the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) market, which is one of the other leading HPC segments which is dominated by a limited number of simulation codes from few ISVs (in CFD, structural mechanics, etc), the pharma industry has a wealth of choice and not only from commercial vendors but also trusted open source or academic codes. Ensuring adequate coverage of this application range is a major effort on the part of Fujitsu.

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