ACADEMIA

Massively Parallel Technologies (Massively), a provider of on-demand high-performance computing, announced today that its Powered by Howard high-performance Blast is the first commercial on-demand software service to make a priori estimates of sequence search times. Unique to Massively’s Howard technology, this patent-pending ability is based upon the parallel compute resources applied to a given problem, the database size and the query length. Combined with Massively’s job processing speedup selection at the click of a button and percentage of job completed indicator bar, biologists and researchers running large Blast jobs using Powered by Howard Blast have unprecedented job control and processing insight that will revolutionize Blast workflows. Users of Massively’s Blast service will no longer be relegated to the painful and time-consuming process of submitting one sequence at a time to NCBI or be faced with the daunting and costly challenge of configuring and managing their own Blast server. Massively’s Powered by Howard, high-performance Blast service is available on the BioTech Virtual Power Center (VPC). “Researchers involved in some of the most interesting and relevant projects have described the tremendous productivity loss breaking up and submitting Blast jobs one sequence at a time to NCBI without any insight as to how long it will take to process their Blast job,” stated Massively’s CTO, Kevin Howard. “As a result, researchers commonly scale back the breadth and frequency of their Blast searches. Massively is the first to break through these limitations with Powered by Howard Blast. Combined with selectable speedup—another Massivley Blast first—our users’ jobs are transparently powered by hundreds of servers, delivering extraordinary job control and productivity increases in comparison to conventional Blast.” Powered by Howard Blast is available by going directly to the BioTech Virtual Power Center (VPC) website – www.mptbiotech.com. Massively’s BioTech VPC delivers the benefits of high-performance supercomputing without the costs and complexities associated with users owning and managing their own compute clusters. Using a standard web browser with Internet access, users can take advantage of Massively’s BioTech VPC without investing in any additional hardware or software. During the introductory period, Massively’s Powered by Howard high-performance Blast with job completion estimator, selectable speedup, Sequence Manipulation Suite, and associated storage space will be provided free of charge.