INDUSTRY

Scalable SGI Hardware and Life Sciences Software Optimized for SGI RASC Platforms Make BioSciences and Drug Discovery Faster, More Efficient, and Cost Effective: An exciting, yet logical new approach that enables scientific organizations to deploy the best computing platform for each application workload is being showcased by SGI this week in Boston at the BioIT World 2007 Conference and Expo. SGI Scientific Workflow Solutions are application- driven to accelerate discovery in genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, genome sequencing and drug discovery. "The typical scientific computing environment today must support a hierarchy of different applications and research workflows that together add up to the organization's scientific enterprise workload," said Deepak Thakkar, Ph.D., BioScience Segment Manager, SGI. "Rather than force-fitting all applications and workflows onto a single computing architecture, it is possible to develop an integrated high performance computing solution which provides a uniform end-user experience but is customized to the needs of each particular customer and application. To be successful, a scientific workflow solution must optimally support each application or a specific workflow, while providing users with the look and feel of a single system, and adapt quickly to the unpredictable nature of scientific research. SGI Scientific Workflow solutions, which can consist of SGI servers, storage, clusters, and SGI RASC programs, are all highly configurable, deliver the feel of a single system and are highly optimized for Life Sciences research." SGI's Scientific Workflow Solutions demonstrations at BioIT World include application software vendors who excel in specific areas of the scientific workflow. Experts from BioTeam, eXludus, Mitrionics, RCH Solutions and Teranode will be in the SGI booth to demonstrate how SGI's complete biosciences solutions deliver cutting-edge performance, accelerate development cycles, and lead to faster time to discovery. "Selecting a Scientific Workflow Solution is not an either-or-decision, but rather one that maximizes research results. Working closely with strategic ISV partners and successfully marrying their applications with our industry standard hardware solutions, we can accelerate specific areas of the scientific workflow enabling our mutual customers to speed their time to results more efficiently and cost effectively," added Dr. Thakkar. "SGI RASC Blades and the Mitrion Virtual Processor . software which adapts each application to accelerate and maximize performance . is but one example of SGI partnerships that will greatly benefit genomic research and drug discovery." SGI's Scientific Workflow Solutions operate in the Linux environment and are targeted to pharmaceutical and biotech companies and researchers alike and can be configured as an optimized solution specific to the customer's need, with SGI NUMAflex architecture laying the groundwork to easily scale to meet the needs of tomorrow and beyond. Strategic independent software vendors (ISVs) who are part of SGI's Booth #405 at BioIT World include: BioTeam The BioTeam is a consulting collective dedicated to delivering informatics solutions to the life science industry. BioTeam has been serving the biotech and pharmaceutical communities for several years, and their principals possess a broad spectrum of skills and experience from scientific analysis to high-performance technical computing infrastructures. BioTeam has proven success at bridging the Science-IT gap. "SGI's technology offerings form a very complete suite of solutions," said Stan Gloss, Managing Director, The BioTeam, Inc. "Their catalog includes all the pieces needed to address the broad problem space of the life sciences. From single unit servers with industry standard processors, through reconfigurable hardware, and even including a wide variety of partner organizations: SGI truly covers all the bases." eXludus Technologies eXludus Technologies provides the Grid Optimizer software suite designed to drive computational throughput for clusters and Grids to new heights. The precision scheduling capabilities of the Schedule Optimizer component (SchedOpt) are applicable to a broad range of throughput workloads, whether on small clusters or large. The technology boosts performance of any compute, networking and file-serving infrastructure, enabling large amounts of processing and data to flow without delays, and interacts directly with popular workload management systems with minimal integration effort. "We are pleased to contribute to SGI's Scientific Workflow Solutions with eXludus's technology for dramatically enhancing the throughput performance of genomics and proteomics processing on clusters and Grids," said Stephen Perrenod, Ph.D., VP Sales and Marketing, eXludus Technologies. "Our Grid Optimizer suite provides the dynamism and fast reaction times needed for accelerating the performance of large workloads on multi-core clusters." eXludus recently announced that SchedOpt boosts throughput performance on clusters up to 8-fold. In a comparison test, SchedOpt was activated on a 24- core SGI Altix XE cluster that was running NCBI-BLAST, the primary tool for sequence comparisons in Bioinformatics. SchedOpt increased throughput (CPU efficiency) by 8.76 times. Mitrionics Mitrionics is the technology leader in the exciting new field of FPGA Supercomputing, which provides higher processing power for running supercomputing applications while utilizing lower energy consumption than clusters of computer systems. The company will be demonstrating its turnkey Mitrion-accelerated BLASTn application running on the Mitrion Virtual Processor in a SGI RASC RC100 system at the Bio-IT World Conference. The Mitrion-accelerated BLAST achieves performance increases up to 19x greater than traditional processors and is the first accelerated application in the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project. The Mitrion-C Open Bio Project is a development program where Mitrionics is developing key applications for the bioinformatics industry and making the applications available to the open source community through www.sourceforge.net. The next application in the project will be BLASTp, scheduled for beta testing in Q2 2007. RCH Solutions Focusing on pharmaceutical, biotech, research institutes and healthcare industries, RCH has been architecting and deploying solutions for over 15 years with Fortune 500 to small and medium-sized companies. As a focus SGI Channel Partner, RCH offers a comprehensive line of blade server, clustering, storage, storage area network (SAN) network attached storage (NAS), grid computing, virtualization, system maintenance and asset management solutions. Covering areas such as Computational Biology, Computational Chemistry, Cheminformatics, Bioinformatics and Clinical Trials, RCH offers a wide array of IT solutions and consulting, allowing researchers the flexibility to implement the appropriate technology for their environment. "RCH is very excited about the new, focused direction of SGI and their ability to offer truly scaleable, high performance compute solutions to the Life Science community," said Michael Riener, Vice President, Sales and Business Development, RCH Solutions. "Our customers continue to require better performing compute systems to suit the unique demands of their various research applications. We believe that SGI has excelled in this area." Teranode Corporation Teranode Corporation is the leading innovator of informatics software that empowers scientists to automate, manage and unify experiment data and workflow within an ever-changing R & D environment. Teranode's award-winning products deliver innovative ways to streamline the R & D lifecycle by providing tools that allow scientists to define their own workflow and data capture model, addressing the need for flexibility. The company's software lets scientists create a way to integrate the fragmented formats and data silos of experiment and in-silico information, breaking down existing proprietary barriers and deliver real-time business intelligence, improving data quality and the decision-making process. "The flexibility of our experiment design automation platform has allowed us to become a virtual R&D platform for several of our strategic customers," said Joseph Duncan, Chief Executive Officer, Teranode Corporation. "SGI's high performance hardware and software platform add enterprise scalability to our flexibility." SGI Scientific Workflow Solutions include SGI Altix high-performance servers with Dual Core Intel Itanium 2 processors, SGI Altix XE high- throughput clusters based on Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, and SGI RASC RC100 computation blades - FPGAs optimized for targeted applications and offering specialized capabilities - as well as highly scalable SGI InfiniteStorage systems. Configurations can consist of any or all of the SGI hardware, along with the customer choice of ISV products that are highly optimized for SGI system architecture. For more information: visit its Web site.