Scalable Human-Centric Cloud Systems for Efficient Drug Repurposing Leveraging Idle Academic Resources

Abstract

In the last few years, cloud-based Information Technology (IT) solutions have become relevant due to providing service-oriented solutions flexibly. Organizations buy cloud computing services as per their needs and pay accordingly. Educational Institutes (EIs) are one of the bodies that consume cloud services to meet their educational, research and development needs. Some of the EIs that face tight budgetary constraints are a bit hesitant to adopt this computation paradigm shift. One of the reasons is that they get concerned about the wastage of the investment that they have already made in their existing IT infrastructure. Consequently, academic research laboratories that require quite extensive computation and storage resources cannot perform their research and development tasks adequately. This study proposes a generic system architecture based on cloud computing. It sets an architectural basis to develop a more adequate resource-sharing computation and storage platform while accommodating the existing IT resources of an EI. For the functional elaboration of the proposed architecture, a methodology dry run is provided. It shows how the proposed architecture enables the better utilization of the existing underutilized resources of the institute. It further elaborates on how these underutilized resources can be made flexibly shareable and accessible to drug repurposing labs. Especially, those labs that extensively and intensively need similar resources to fulfil their computation and storage needs. The statistical analysis shows that the proposed architecture is equally beneficial for both resource-providing and resource-consuming bodies.

In the last few years, cloud-based Information Technology (IT) solutions have become relevant due to providing service-oriented solutions flexibly. Organizations buy cloud computing services as per their needs and pay accordingly. Educational Institutes (EIs) are one of the bodies that consume cloud services to meet their educational, research and development needs. Some of the EIs that face tight budgetary constraints are a bit hesitant to adopt this computation paradigm shift. One of the reasons is that they get concerned about the wastage of the investment that they have already made in their existing IT infrastructure. Consequently, academic research laboratories that require quite extensive computation and storage resources cannot perform their research and development tasks adequately. This study proposes a generic system architecture based on cloud computing. It sets an architectural basis to develop a more adequate resource-sharing computation and storage platform while accommodating the existing IT resources of an EI. For the functional elaboration of the proposed architecture, a methodology dry run is provided. It shows how the proposed architecture enables the better utilization of the existing underutilized resources of the institute. It further elaborates on how these underutilized resources can be made flexibly shareable and accessible to drug repurposing labs. Especially, those labs that extensively and intensively need similar resources to fulfil their computation and storage needs. The statistical analysis shows that the proposed architecture is equally beneficial for both resource-providing and resource-consuming bodies.