April 5, 2002 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IBM today announced that Merck & Co. Inc., a pharmaceutical products and services company, will use IBM eServer p690 systems to help develop a new generation of drugs.
Researching the basic aspects of the drug development process, Merck will use the IBM eServer p690 systems for database searching, chemical property computation, sophisticated quantum mechanical computations and clustering.
The pharmaceutical company selected five 32-way p690 systems with a total of three terabytes of TotalStorage 7133 Serial Disk storage. The IBM eServer p690 implements a system-on-a-chip design that supplies tremendous power and reliability with comparatively few processors. Built with technology from IBM’s Project eLiza initiative, the IBM eServer p690 offers multiple layers of self-healing technologies that allow the server to continue operating. Operated as a single large server or divided into as many as 16 “virtual” servers, the IBM eServer p690 running any combination of the AIX 5L and Linux operating systems.
The new servers join a pair of IBM SP supercomputing systems, already in operation at Merck.
?Merck is very advanced in its use of powerful computers to develop the next generation of drugs,? said Val Rahmani, general manager, IBM eServer, pSeries.
