For Genentech, this was cheap and easy compared to the alternative of buying 10,000 cores for its own data center and having them idle away with no work for most of their lives, Corn says. Using Genentech’s existing resources to perform the simulations would take weeks or months instead of the eight hours it took on Amazon, he says. Genentech benefited from the high number of cores because its calculations were “embarrassingly parallel,” with no communication between nodes, so performance stats “scaled linearly with the number of cores,” Corn said.