Pfizer Partners with REvolution Computing to Improve Medicine Productio...( Parallel caret 'R' Software Pr...),Health

Parallel caret 'R' Software Provides Faster Analysis of Safety

Characteristics of New Drugs

BOSTON, April 29 /PRNewswire/ -- BIO IT World Conference and Exposition -- REvolution Computing, the leading provider of commercial open-source "R" software for computational statistics, today released the results of "A Benchmark Study of Large-Scale Chemical Classification on Quad-Core AMD Systems," a study conducted in partnership with Pfizer on the use of caretNWS, a parallel version of caret implemented using REvolution's Parallel R for high performance classification studies related to safety in drug discovery. The new package, caretNWS, is available for public use and can be accessed at http://www.cran.r-project.org .

The research showed that the parallel caret (caretNWS) software scales well on multiprocessors and speeds the analysis of large data sets, reducing the number of potential candidate molecules for new drugs, making the drug development process more cost efficient and timely.

"Using REvolution Computing's software solutions, we were able to improve our ability to bring new medicines to the market quickly," said Max Kuhn, Associate Director of Non-Clinical Statistics, Pfizer, Inc. "CaretNWS is an asset in the battle against the rising costs associated with new drug development, which is why this is available on a broad, public basis. The ability to conduct large data analysis across multi-core processors represents a significant benefit for drug discovery and development," Kuhn added.

The pharmaceutical industry requires thorough, fast, and inexpensive analysis of large amounts data. However, existing data mining software products are not designed to maximize high performance computers' speed and full capabilities. REvolution Computing answers the problem by deploying open-source analytical language "R" across the multi-processors found in
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