ACADEMIA

Global Interest in Accelerated BLAST Shown From Mitrionics and SGI Customers: Mitrionics today announced it has begun development to accelerate the BLASTP bioinformatics application for FPGA Supercomputing. Expected to enter BETA testing in Q2, BLASTP is the second open source application being developed under the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project with the first application being the NCBI BLASTN. BLASTP is used to compare amino acid query sequences against a protein sequence database and returns the most similar protein sequences. BLAST is used by scientists and researchers worldwide for similarity searches for genes and proteins and is the main tool for data mining in large databases in molecular biology. "Customer interest for our first accelerated BLAST application has been very strong worldwide and we're excited to begin development on our second application under the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project," stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. "And we're especially pleased that our strong partnership with SGI continues to produce more and more joint bioinformatics customers in the U.S., EU and now Asia." "Mitrionics' development of an FPGA accelerated open-source implementation of BLASTP will bring a new level of performance to the protein analysis pipeline," said Michael Brown, sciences segment manager for SGI. "This will allow researchers in pharmaceutical, biotech and academic environments to quickly identify homologous proteins and associated domains of newly discovered proteins, shortening the time to predict their biological function." As they are developed, the Mitrion-accelerated applications will be available to Mitrionics and SGI customers at no charge and also will be contributed to the bioinformatics community as open source through the web site: www.sourceforge.net. The open source Mitrion BLAST versions can be modified and refined by scientists and developers by using the Mitrion Software Development Kit (SDK) Personal Edition -- also available at no charge from www.mitrionics.com. Mitrion-accelerated BLAST applications are designed to run on the Mitrion Virtual Processor operating in FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)-based computer systems including the SGI RASC RC100 computation blade in SGI Altix family servers, built with dual Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs. The turnkey BLAST application provides instant FPGA Supercomputing performance acceleration without requiring any development costs, time, or risks by the customer. The Mitrion-accelerated BLAST marks a major industry milestone by achieving significant performance increases over traditional processors and it is the first commercially available FPGA-accelerated application to run on systems from a major vendor.