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PII‐71
Author(s) -
Ng C. M.,
Bauer R. J.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
clinical pharmacology and therapeutics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.941
H-Index - 188
eISSN - 1532-6535
pISSN - 0009-9236
DOI - 10.1016/j.clpt.2005.12.196
Subject(s) - pentium , computer science , population , scalability , algorithm , parallel computing , computer cluster , cluster (spacecraft) , monte carlo method , mathematics , statistics , medicine , distributed computing , database , operating system , environmental health
BACKGROUND Development of population pharmacokinetic (PK)/pharmacodynamic(PD)/efficacy model used for the clinical trial simulation in drug development is resource and time intensive. OBJECTIVE This study describes the use of Beowulf cluster to accelerate the performance of MCPEM algorithm in developing complex population PK/PD/efficacy model. METHODS The Beowulf cluster consisted of six Pentium 4 computers connected with gigabit ethernet switch. A MC‐PEM algorithm in S‐ADAPT program was written in Fortran and run on Windows XP Professional operating system. A PK/PD/efficacy data of efalizumab from 240 psoriasis patients was used to develop the complex mechanism‐based population PK/PD/efficacy model. The model consisted of six differential equations and 22 parameters and fit simultaneously to the data. The performance of the cluster was considered satisfactory and have a good scalability if the parallel efficiency (= time to complete a single iteration by a single node/time to complete a single iteration by all six cluster nodes* number (of cluster nodes)) is ≥0.5. RESULTS Depending on the loading size for each computer node (ranged from 5–40), the parallel efficiency ranged from 0.49 to 0.90. This corresponding to inefficiency of 0.51 to 0.10 that was mainly due to communication overhead and load imbalance between different cluster nodes. CONCLUSION The Beowulf cluster is able to accelerate the performance of MCPEM algorithm in analyzing the complex population PK/PD/efficacy data. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (2005) 79 , P54–P54; doi: 10.1016/j.clpt.2005.12.196