SYSTEMS

PASADENA, CA -- Platform Computing Inc., the global leader in distributed computing software, and Paracel Inc., a business unit of Celera Genomics (NYSE: CRA), announced today that they have entered into an agreement that would allow Paracel to offer Platform LSF with the Paracel BlastMachine(TM) and GeneMatcher(TM) systems. Paracel will offer Platform LSF as an option to BlastMachine customers, allowing them to run general-purpose compute jobs in addition to Paracel BLAST on the BlastMachine system. Platform LSF will also facilitate management of Paracel BLAST jobs in bioinformatics pipelines. "The BlastMachine and GeneMatcher systems, with Platform LSF, are now strong solutions for scientists who require high-throughput searching of genomic and proteomic databases but also want to run additional bioinformatics applications on Paracel's Linux cluster platform," said Shi-Ping Hsu, Ph.D., general manager of Paracel and vice president of Celera Genomics. "With the growing popularity of Linux clusters, Platform LSF is becoming increasingly important to our customers. This collaboration with Platform demonstrates Paracel's commitment to helping customers integrate Paracel's products into automated search systems." "This collaboration with Paracel demonstrates our commitment to provide integrated solutions to the bioinformatics community," said Yury Rozenman, director, business development, life sciences, Platform. "As a key component of our Life Sciences solution, Platform LSF delivers consistent performance, reliability, and scalability. It is the industry standard for distributed and Grid computing across a wide range of compute platforms." The Paracel BlastMachine system is a cluster of dual-processor Pentium systems, running RedHat Linux and Paracel BLAST software. Paracel BLAST is based on the public domain NCBI BLAST, with performance optimizations for Intel architectures, enhancements to support concurrent searching on multiple processors, and extensions to facilitate large-scale problems of interest to pharmaceutical, biotech and academic biologists. GeneMatcher systems are now bundled with Linux clusters that can be used for postprocessing of GeneMatcher searches and for Paracel BLAST searches. With the addition of Platform LSF, it will now be possible for GeneMatcher customers to also run general-purpose compute jobs on the same Linux cluster. Introduced in 1997, Paracel's GeneMatcher system was the first computer designed for commercial use with custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology to specifically analyze genetic information. GeneMatcher computers precisely analyze similarities and differences of DNA or protein sequences in relation to other sequences of known genetic location and function. These comparisons provide researchers with critical insights for drug discovery and other genetic research applications. The GeneMatcher system is a plug-and-play computation server that can be connected to any network. It is delivered with a full suite of software tools from Paracel allowing GeneMatcher to be easily used in most bioinformatics environments. Platform LSF is a workload management software suite that lets organizations manage their computing workloads, maximize the use of existing hardware and software, and shorten the time to deliver results. Platform LSF harnesses all available computing resources, including servers, desktops, supercomputers and clusters, to process jobs efficiently, complete workloads faster and increase user productivity. The BLAST algorithm, developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), is the sequence search algorithm most commonly used by genomic researchers. For its new BlastMachine system, Paracel has rewritten portions of the NCBI BLAST algorithm to improve speed and accommodate larger query lengths, without compromising the quality of the search results. BlastMachine software, integrated with a Linux cluster by Paracel, scales gracefully through efficient distribution of data and computing across multiple processors. For further information visit www.platform.com or www.paracel.com