Technology giant IBM (News - Alert) announced partnership with CloudBroker, a high-performance cloud computing company, to use cloud computing technology to assist science and technology university ETH Zurich in developing new antibiotics to fight disease.

IBM is assisting the research by offering its SmartCloud Enterprise while CloudBroker is offering its enhanced queuing and data management solution. The IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise enabled the team to access almost 250,000 computing hours on a total of 1,000 parallel CPUs producing research on the structure of specific proteins found in the streptococcus bacteria which commonly causes strep throat in humans.

The team also deployed Rosetta, the open-source software that predicts and designs protein structures, protein folding mechanisms, and protein-protein interactions, on the cloud.

Using these systems, researchers from ETH Zurich's Institute of Molecular Systems Biology were able to identify nearly 250 potential virulence factors – or molecules that are secreted by bacteria, viruses, fungi, or protozoa and then multiply within humans. Using this data, the researchers created nearly 2.3 million three-dimensional models with nearly 30,000 background data packets to study the function of these harmful, disease causing pathogens.

Company officials say the technology from IBM and CloudBroker helped the research team analyze the massive amount of data within two weeks, a task that would have taken several months without the use of IBM's cloud computing technologies.

The study of bacterial proteins is becoming increasingly important because understanding the complex elements of bacteria will help in identifying the risks and determining drugs that can fight resistant strands. The research gains relevance especially when the World Health Organization has found that the number of antimicrobial resistant pathogens is increasing dramatically, threatening treatments to tuberculosis, malaria and other now common illnesses caused by various bacteria.

“For our experiments, we need very high capacity in short time frames,” said Dr. Lars Malmstrom, ETH Zurich’s lead researcher, in a statement. “Cloud computing allows to reserve this computing capacity whenever researchers need it, and it is available quickly. Research teams do not need to set it up or maintain it, and thus can concentrate better on their research.”

In another major development, IBM recently announced the launch of a new analytics appliance that allows organizations to analyze up to 10 petabytes of data in a matter of minutes. The new IBM Netezza (News - Alert) High Capacity Appliance is designed for use in banks, insurance companies and healthcare industry.