ACADEMIA

Mitrionics, developer of the Mitrion Virtual Processor and software-centric Mitrion-C programming language for FPGA Supercomputing acceleration, today announced a development project for the BLAST bioinformatics application. BLAST is used by scientists and researchers worldwide for similarity searches for genes and proteins and is the main tool for data mining in large databases in molecular biology. Scheduled for release in Q3 of 2006, the Mitrionics developed and certified BLAST application is designed to run on the Mitrion Virtual Processor operating in FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)-based computer systems including the SGI RASC RC100 computation blade in SGI Altix family servers, built with dual Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs. The turnkey BLAST application will provide instant FPGA Supercomputing performance acceleration without requiring any development costs, time, or risks by the customer. Mitrionics will distribute and license the BLAST application to customers of its Mitrion Virtual Processor. "Our turnkey version of BLAST will enable scientists and researchers in the bioinformatics industry to immediately realize the tremendous benefits of performance acceleration and lower power requirements made possible with the Mitrion Virtual Processor," stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. "We've taken these steps to benefit our potential customers and also to create optimal conditions for the increased growth of FPGA Supercomputing."