Computer-Assistant Drug Discovery with the Netezza Architecture

While relational databases have become critically important in business applications and web services, they have played a relatively minor role in scientific computing, especially in computer-assistant drug discovery, which has generally been concerned with modeling and simulation activities. However, massively parallel database architectures are beginning to offer the ability to quickly search through terabytes of data with hundred-fold or even thousand-fold speedup over server-based architectures. These new machines may enable an entirely new class of algorithms for scientific applications. The drug discovery and development community is able now to make good use of these new database machines.