GridMarkets helps speed drug discovery with high-performance Oracle Cloud
“The big difference between Oracle and its competitors is that Oracle’s VMs have more memory, more compute, and are more responsive. It’s just a much better value for us and our customers.”
Business challenges
GridMarkets’ platform gives computational chemists, animators, and visual effects artists a fast and affordable way to render animations or simulate mathematical models in the cloud. Co-founded in 2011 by serial entrepreneur Mark Ross, GridMarkets is part of the Oracle for Startups program that supports growing young companies, and runs the GridMarkets platform on high-performance servers in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions around the world.
GridMarkets doesn’t put user workloads in queues or schedule them for rendering, so its customers can access all the virtual machines they need at any time, and their jobs run immediately. That means GridMarkets can’t predict the number of VMs the company will need at any given time. When it ran on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, GridMarkets had to estimate capacity and pay premiums to reserve it, which often meant high costs for overages or paying for unused capacity.
We don’t own or maintain any hardware, and we’re paying 70% less to spin up an instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure than we did running workloads on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.
Why GridMarkets Chose Oracle
Results
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure costs GridMarkets about 70% less than running its high-performance workloads on AWS or Google Cloud.
Since moving workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, GridMarkets is able to run complex mathematical simulations and render ultra-heavy special effects in record time compared with the days and potentially months it took previously with on-premises server farms. For example, using GridMarkets has allowed one university to reduce video rendering time from six days or more to just hours, because it can access all the nodes that it needs and run them simultaneously in the cloud.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also helps configure GridMarkets’ software and compute resources for each of its clients’ jobs, encrypts the client’s data, and when the job’s finished, automatically shuts down the machines, so there are no lingering costs charged to the company or its customers for unused capacity.
Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also lets GridMarkets’ customers access high-performance computing from any location, including people working from home. That helps drug researchers, students, and freelancers continue working despite being shut out of physical computer labs due to COVID-19.