Mitrionics and SGI customers validate global demand for accelerated FPGA technology

Mitrionics, Inc., developer of the Mitrion Software Acceleration Platform and the Mitrion Virtual Processor, announced that a growing number of global companies, organizations, and universities that are using their accelerated FPGA technology platform and NCBI BLAST-n application. The Mitrion-Accelerated BLAST application runs on a turnkey SGI RASC™ RC100 blade system equipped with the latest powerful and energy-efficient FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) from Xilinx. Leveraging the ultra-fast memory subsystem in SGI Altix servers and the Mitrion Virtual Processor, the accelerated NCBI BLAST application achieves performance increases from 20x to 60x faster than the non-accelerated NCBI BLAST running on a quad-core Opteron processor. The performance increase range depends on the size of the queries, with very large queries having the highest performance.

"As one of the earliest adopters of the Mitrion-Accelerated BLASTN on an SGI system, I can personally attest to its architectural advantages and performance benefits over traditional systems and clusters," said Nicolas Juge, research associate and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Université Laval, Canada. "The SGI's RASC system is straight forward to install and easy to run; it does not require complex system administration tasks like a cluster. Mitrion-Accelerated BLAST-n is fully compatible with the standard NCBI BLAST and can be easily integrated into existing sequence analysis pipelines. And since Mitrionics chose to release the code as open source, this is a real advantage: we can learn from it, improve it or adapt it to our specific needs. I believe that the potential for FPGA technologies in bioinformatics is great and I'm looking forward to seeing additional bioinformatics applications and technology refinements from both companies."

"The global interest, customer demand, and implementations of our Mitrion-Accelerated BLAST solution with SGI represents one of the most important industry milestones in high performance computing over the past year," stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. "Our close partnership and technology collaboration has produced a tightly-coupled, hardware/software solution that is providing value and Accelerated Computing productivity benefits to life sciences organizations in real-world conditions."

"The successful collaborative development with Mitrionics has enabled SGI to deliver an FPGA solution that eases the implementation of FPGA technology for life sciences customers, making application performance enhancements available to address issues in a range of bioinformatics environments and thereby improving productivity," said Deepak Thakkar, biosciences market segment manager, SGI.

Global Mitrionics/SGI Customers for Accelerated BLAST Include:

· Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Spain
· Nanjing University - China
· National Human Genome Center- China
· Purdue University - USA
· University of Arizona - USA
· University of California - Riverside - USA
· University of Laval – Canada

The SGI RASC Appliance for Bioinformatics is a pre-configured solution that dramatically simplifies nucleotide sequence queries using BLAST-n. The industrial-scale appliance addresses productivity problems in a range of bioinformatics environments -- from those that serve thousands of users running BLAST queries against a single database, to others with smaller numbers of users running complex queries against databases that are hundreds of Gigabytes in size.

Mitrionics