CeBiTec FPGA Platform Runs Tera-BLAST Hundreds of Times Faster
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The Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at Bielefeld University has added TimeLogic’s latest J-series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware to their computational tools platform. TimeLogic’s DeCypher systems are designed to greatly increase the speed of sequence comparison by combining custom FPGA circuitry with optimized implementations of BLAST, Smith-Waterman, Hidden Markov Model and gene modeling algorithms.
According to Michael Murray, Manager of Sales & Marketing for TimeLogic products at Active Motif, “This purchase represents the expansion of an existing DeCypher system, and we’re very proud of the fact that CeBiTec, like so many of our TimeLogic customers, continues to update their DeCypher platform with the inclusion of our latest FPGA hardware. This J-series FPGA platform will run Tera-BLAST, our accelerated BLAST implementation, many hundreds of times faster than the software-only version.”
Ted DeFrank, President of Active Motif also added, “The TimeLogic brand is the one of the original pioneers in the field of accelerated bioinformatics. We’re very excited about this latest hardware revision, as it will once again catapult TimeLogic far ahead of any other accelerated biocomputing solution and further strengthen our position as the leader in the field.”
According to Prof. Dr. Alexander Goesmann, who was responsible as principal investigator for the acquisition of the systems and has recently been appointed professor at Giessen University, a broad range of analysis workflows in the research areas of genome annotation, comparative genomics and metagenomics relying on sequence similarity searches can now be greatly accelerated.
Dr. Stefan Albaum, Executive Director of the Bioinformatics Resource Facility (BRF) at CeBiTec, added “We are really excited about the latest products from TimeLogic — not least since these systems allow us to release significant compute capacities on our general compute cluster for other bioinformatics applications.”
