A team comprising scientists and computing experts from industry and academia under the leadership of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has released a peer-reviewed journal publication concerning the Transferring Exascale Computational Chemistry to Cloud Computing Environment and Emerging Hardware Technologies, or TEC4, initiative.
Using Cloud for Computationally Intensive Algorithms
PNNL said Monday that under the initiative, researchers ported to the cloud computationally intensive algorithms that work to establish whether proposed chemicals for various applications are actually feasible. The aim of the effort is to establish the viability of cloud computing serving as a complement to high-performance computing facilities.
According to the journal publication, the researchers found that cloud computing could accelerate the execution of advanced computational chemistry workflows, bringing timeframes down from months to days. The study evaluated the performance of new as well as legacy software.
Bundling SaaS With Cloud Computing
Commenting on the effort, Karol Kowalski, a computational chemist with PNNL, said, “We have shown that it’s possible to bundle software-as-a-service with cloud computing resources. This initial proof-of-concept shows that cloud computing can provide a menu of options to complement and supplement high-performance computing for solving complex scientific problems.”
