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Mitrionics Begins Development on 2nd BLAST/Bioinformatics Application (BLASTP) for FPGA Supercomputing


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Global Interest in Accelerated BLAST Shown from Mitrionics and SGI Customers

Los Angeles, CA – February 19, 2007 - Mitrionics™, Inc., developer of the Mitrion™ Virtual Processor and software-centric Mitrion-C programming language for FPGA Supercomputing acceleration, today announced it has begun development to accelerate the BLASTP bioinformatics application for FPGA Supercomputing. Expected to enter BETA testing in Q2, BLASTP is the second open source application being developed under the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project with the first application being the NCBI BLASTN. BLASTP is used to compare amino acid query sequences against a protein sequence database and returns the most similar protein sequences. 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.

“Customer interest for our first accelerated BLAST application has been very strong worldwide and we’re excited to begin development on our second application under the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project,” stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. “And we’re especially pleased that our strong partnership with SGI continues to produce more and more joint bioinformatics customers in the U.S. EU, and now Asia.”

“Mitrionics’ development of an FPGA accelerated open-source implementation of BLASTP will bring a new level of performance to the protein analysis pipeline,” said Michael Brown, sciences segment manager for SGI. “This will allow researchers in pharmaceutical, biotech and academic environments to quickly identify homologous proteins and associated domains of newly discovered proteins, shortening the time to predict their biological function.”

As they are developed, the Mitrion-accelerated applications will be available to Mitrionics and SGI customers at no charge and also will be contributed to the bioinformatics community as open source through the web site: sourceforge.net. The open source Mitrion BLAST versions can be modified and refined by scientists and developers by using the Mitrion Software Development Kit (SDK) Personal Edition – also available at no charge from www.mitrionics.com.

Mitrion-accelerated BLAST applications are 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 provides instant FPGA Supercomputing performance acceleration without requiring any development costs, time, or risks by the customer. The Mitrion-accelerated BLAST marks a major industry milestone by achieving significant performance increases over traditional processors and it is the first commercially available FPGA-accelerated application to run on systems from a major vendor

About BLAST.
BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is the primary tool for sequence comparisons in Bioinformatics and contains several subprograms for different computational problems. These subprograms all use a heuristic search algorithm designed to speed up computations while retaining sensitivity. The amount of sequence data in public databases has been growing faster than CPU speed, making speed a fundamental problem in bioinformatics data mining.

The Mitrion Open Bio Project
The Mitrion Bio Project is a new program from Mitrionics where the company will actively participate in the development of FPGA accelerated key bioinformatics applications such as various BLAST versions, Smith-Waterman, and Hidden Markov Models. BLAST with an accelerated BLASTN program is the first FPGA Supercomputing application available under this project. As they are developed, the Mitrion-accelerated applications will be available to Mitrionics and SGI customers at no charge and also will be contributed to the bioinformatics community as open source through the web site: sourceforge.net. The open source Mitrion BLAST can be modified and refined by scientists and developers by using the Mitrion Software Development Kit (SDK) Personal Edition – also available at no charge from www.mitrionics.com. A commercial version of the Mitrion SDK is also available separately and customers have numerous support and training options available from Mitrionics as well.


About the Mitrion Platform and Mitrion Virtual Processor
The fine-grained, massively parallel Mitrion Virtual Processor is the core of the Mitrion Platform. It runs software written in the Mitrion-C programming language in FPGAs and completely eliminates the need for the programmer to master hardware design. The Mitrion Virtual Processor has a unique architecture that lets it be adapted to each program it is running in order to maximize performance. Together with the Mitrion Software Development Kit, it offers a unique solution for developing supercomputing applications for FPGAs on a true software level. This dramatically reduces the total development costs for FPGA-based software acceleration, and more importantly, enables the whole supercomputing industry to benefit from FPGA application acceleration.

About Mitrionics
Founded in 2001, Mitrionics, Inc. is the technology leader in the exciting new field of FPGA Supercomputing which provides higher processing power and lower energy consumption than clusters of computer systems. The company’s Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit provide cost effective FPGA Supercomputing power to organizations for their most critical applications. The Mitrion Platform is unique from any other FPGA programming solution, because it eliminates the need for circuit design skills, thus making FPGA Supercomputing performance accessible to an entire new market of scientists and developers. Mitrionics has key industry relationships with Cray, Nallatech, and Silicon Graphics. For more information, visit the company Web site at www.mitrionics.com, or call 310-558-9495, or email: info@mitrionics.com.

Mitrionics, Mitrion, Mitrion Platform, Mitrion Virtual Processor, and Mitrion Software Development Kit are trademarks of Mitrionics, Inc.

Altix and SGI are registered trademarks, and RASC is a trademark of SGI in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.



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