APPLICATIONS

Massively Parallel Technologies (MPT), a provider of on-demand high-performance computing, announced today that early beta testers of its BioTech BLAST Virtual Power Center (VPC) dramatically reduced time-to-answers for large and complex search sequences. The beta tester program helped the company to better understand the challenges and needs of life scientists related to search sequences that currently take hours or days to complete. MPT's version of BLAST is a high-speed and high-throughput implementation of the National Center for Bioinformatics' BLAST software that transparently and efficiently harnesses the power of hundreds of compute nodes for large queries and databases. The functionality of MPT's BLAST VPC, fully integrated with storage and standard Internet browser access, delivers an invaluable bioinformatics tool to biologists and other researchers seeking reduced time-to-answers while ensuring accurate and quality results. Beta testers, consisting of academic researchers located throughout the United States and a service provider for computational resources and bioinformatics expertise for computer aided drug design and drug discovery programs, used the company's Internet accessible VPC to conduct their searches. The BLAST VPC completed large jobs significantly faster than users' existing solutions. "The ability to submit a large and complex BLAST query via the Internet is impressive in and of itself, but the time-to-answer was far better than anything I've ever experienced before," said Alecksandr Kutchma, Bioinformatics Research Assistant Professor at the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes Research a the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC). "MPT's technology will help accelerate research efforts in finding cures for everything from diabetes to cancer." Kutchma's initial testing also compared NCBI BLAST and WU-BLAST to MPT's BLAST VPC capabilities using the same search criteria. The benchmarking indicates that MPT delivers the fastest solution with the highest quality of results. Jan Jensen, Associate Professor and Kutchma's supervisor added, "We were able to conduct preliminary work for a grant request in two-and-a-half weeks-an effort that commonly takes two years to complete. A key contributor to the dramatic reduction in time was MPT's BLAST solution." Jensen's success story supports findings in a President's Information Technology Advisory Council June 2005 report which states, "the practical difference between obtaining results in hours, rather than weeks or years, is substantial -- it qualitatively changes the range of studies one can conduct." "Until now access to high performance computing was cost-prohibitive and complex for many potential users or the performance using inexpensive clusters was disappointing," said Scott Smith, chief executive officer of Massively Parallel Technologies. "As these successful beta tests are showing, Massively Parallel's solution gives users easy access to true high-end supercomputing power at a cost comparable to cellular phone service. More importantly, the BLAST VPC's fast time-to-answers with its high quality results increases researcher productivity while ensuring biologically relevant results, making for the most effective use of time, resources and funds."