APPLICATIONS

SGI Collaboration Will Aid Cross-Industry Group's Integration of Science and Technology: To spearhead new ways of sharing complex data in the bioinformatics market, SGI today announced that the company has joined the BioIT Alliance, a group of organizations working together to realize the potential of personalized medicine. The Alliance unites the pharmaceutical, biotech, hardware, and software industries to explore new ways to share complex biomedical data and collaborate among multi-disciplinary teams to speed the pace of discovery in the life sciences. "By joining the BioIT Alliance, SGI deepens its commitment to biosciences professionals and continues to advance innovative ways this user community can meet the challenges they face of ever-increasing workflow demands," said Deepak Thakkar, biosciences segment manager, SGI. "We are very pleased to join the Alliance and look forward to collaborating with other distinguished members." The BioIT Alliance brings together science and technology leaders to consider new ways to address the unique technical challenges life scientists face in data integration, collaboration, and knowledge management and use Microsoft technology to reduce costs, streamline research, and market their products more effectively. "The BioIT Alliance welcomes SGI, a company whose legacy in the sciences field and advances in shared memory processing architecture enables greatly accelerated performance, especially for the large data sets bioinformatics research now requires," said Don Rule, BioIT Alliance Manager and business development manager of Microsoft Strategic Relations. "SGI's long-standing customer base and industry acclaim within the life sciences community will be a terrific asset to the Alliance as we move forward in decoding the mysteries of humans, plants and animals for the betterment of all." The decision to join the Alliance falls on-the-heals of the recent launch of SGI Scientific Workflow Solution optimized for life sciences. The SGI Scientific Workflow Solution addresses an increasingly costly problem in today's research labs. To enable new breakthroughs in biosciences and other disciplines, modern scientific workflows must incorporate an ever-widening array of applications -- something that puts extraordinary pressures on organizations struggling to make do with a single primary computing resource. SGI's Scientific Workflow Solution is a hybrid computing solution that successfully blends three different computing architectures -- x86 clusters, shared memory systems and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) -- and data storage into a single, integrated workflow environment to satisfy the diverse application performance requirements. "With decades of experience and knowledge with our life sciences customers, SGI remains at the forefront of understanding the overwhelming need for robust, optimized, integrated, open system solutions that blast through bottlenecks in genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, genome sequencing and drug discovery," added Thakkar. For information on biosciences solutions from SGI visit its Web site.