Pharmaceutical giant Novartis is creating a computing grid that will draw on the power of 2,700 PCs across the company.

The grid is expected to provide five trillion operations per second of extra computing power, at a total cost of around £450,000.

'The real advantage is that we have the ability to grow our processing resource as needed by simply adding more desktops to the grid at very low cost,' said Manuel Peitsch, Novartis' head of informatics and knowledge management for pharmaceutical research.

The company is using software from United Devices to collect and aggregate unused processing power from desktop computers across its global network of researchers to create the grid.

'Companies already have the hardware in place, which are already supported and managed, so all of that cost is avoided. The grid can then be piggybacked on top of that infrastructure,' said Peitsch.

'We wanted to exploit the fact that we have standardised our desktop infrastructure onto Pentium 4 processors from Intel,' he said.

The grid is initially being rolled out across researchers' desktops, although Peitsch has plans to extend it across up to 10,000 of the company's PCs over the next 12 to 18 months.

'The only barrier to rolling this out further is the cost-benefit ratio between additional software licences for the grid and the power that it provides us with,' he said.

Novartis corporate chief information officer Peter Sany said: 'Computing resources are a key driver of shortened timelines, facilitating our goal of bringing more novel drugs to patients faster.'

The decoding of the human genome has transformed drug discovery and molecular research, with 300 potential drug targets growing to 30,000, creating opportunities for very precise drugs that work more effectively.