Speaker
Description
The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is pleased to announce the launch of a novel Software as a Service (SaaS) initiative designed to accelerate innovation and reinforce the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across the European pharmaceutical sector. This initiative focuses on two core pillars, each leveraging state-of-the-art High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures and expertise.
The first pillar addresses the generation of large-scale, high-quality synthetic data by combining quantum mechanical calculations with molecular dynamics simulations. These data will serve as the foundation for training next-generation foundation models and the most accurate Molecular Force Fields for life science applications. CINECA, one of Europe’s premier supercomputing centers, will lead the effort to provide the computational power and technical support required to pursue this ambitious objective at scale.
The second pillar builds on the outcomes of the EU-funded project LIGATE and will offer a sophisticated virtual screening platform for structure-based drug discovery as a SaaS solution. By making this advanced tool available to the wider research community—especially SMEs and academic groups—PRACE aims to foster broad access to cutting-edge computational drug design techniques. This service will be underpinned by the LEXIS (Large-scale EXecution for Industry & Society) HPC cloud infrastructure, in conjunction with resources from two leading HPC centers, CINECA (Italy) and IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center (Czech Republic).
Through this two-pronged strategy, PRACE’s SaaS initiative seeks to propel European SMEs and researchers to the forefront of high-performance, AI-driven drug discovery, thereby strengthening Europe’s competitive edge in the global pharmaceutical marketplace.
