Cutting edge hardware-accelerated bioinformatics from CLC bio

Today CLC bio announced the release of a range of flexible, affordable and fast hardware-accelerated bioinformatics solutions to supplement their existing bioinformatics software packages, and to provide an alternative to expensive computer clusters.

The hardware-solutions are based on completely new and innovative ways of chip design, ensuring a performance per accelerator unit of at least 25 times that of a fast desktop computer.

Due to the cutting edge design and construction of the products, they can be offered at very competitive price levels compared to traditional high-performance bioinformatics solutions such as large clusters of computers, clusters and other types of hardware. The purchase price is reasonable, and there are no costs related to setup, systems administration and computer cooling.

CLC bio will offer the most flexible bioinformatics hardware solution in the market:

• Flexibility in physical location: The accelerators are small external boxes which can be easily connected to any desktop computer or server via a USB 2.0 port. This eliminates the need for technical personnel for installation and maintenance.
• Flexibility in operating system: The accelerators can be connected to any type of desktop computer via a USB port, whether a Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows computer.
• Flexibility in software use: The accelerators can be used either through a commandline interface, as a fully integrated part of the bioinformatics software products from CLC bio, or through an internal web interface.
• Flexibility in price: The price level depends on the number of accelerators acquired and the type and number of algorithms to be included in the hardware.

Dr. Bill Farmerie, Assistant Director at the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR), University of Florida states, “I certainly believe that individual scientists need a costefficient desktop solution that will suffice for most of their homology searching needs. CLC bio’s new hardware definitely sounds like it could be a solution, and I'm anxious to test the fast Smith-Waterman analyses on our 454 sequencing data in the coming months.”

The first bioinformatics solutions will be released this summer, including accelerated Smith-Waterman searches and BLASTP searches. Additional types of BLAST searches will follow soon after, and other bioinformatics algorithms will be released later in 2006 and 2007.

CLC bio presently invites organizations to join the team of test users for the upcoming and future hardware releases. Interested parties can apply by contacting CLC bio or by signing up via the article webpage.