GOVERNMENT

Cartesian Gridspeed, a New Zealand bioinformatics software developer, will officially launch its SLIM Search product to the US market at the BIO 2007 Convention in Boston. Cartesian Gridspeed's Chief Scientist Leonard Bloksberg said, "On this trip to the United States, we have already seen incredible interest in our software. We have been invited, unsolicited, by major research laboratories and pharmaceutical companies to talk about what our technology could do for them, and see some major initiatives growing out of these discussions." A major computational hurdle in genomics research is the demanding hardware requirements associated with sequence searching. SLIM Search's patented sequence search technology has the potential to completely redefine genomics research by endowing a single work station with the computing power of a multiple-node supercomputer cluster. SLIM Search operates up to 10,000 times faster than the industry standard software BLAST. Dr Bloksberg provides an illustration, "Our software deployed on a single work station could outperform a column of servers stacked one mile high running BLAST. In practical terms this means that SLIM Search opens possibilities for biological research that heretofore were either impossible or too tedious and time consuming to be practical." SLIM Search Academic, Professional, and Enterprise can be obtained at its Web site.