A Case Study of Drug Repositioning Simulation based on Distributed Supercomputing Technology

In this paper, we present a case study for a drug repositioning simulation based on distributed supercomputing technology that requires highly efficient processing of large-scale computations. Drug repositioning is the application of known drugs and compounds to new indications (i.e., new diseases), and this process requires efficient processing of a large number of docking tasks with relatively short per-task execution times. This mechanism shows the main characteristics of a Many-Task Computing (MTC) application, and as a representative case of MTC applications, we have applied a drug repositioning simulation in our HTCaaS system which can leverage distributed supercomputing infrastructure, and show that efficient task dispatching, dynamic resource allocation and load balancing, reliability, and seamless integration of multiple computing resources are crucial to support these challenging scientific applications.