2011/11/14

Active Motif and the CeBiTec Form Partnership to Jointly Develop Computational Tools for TimeLogic Corporation's FPGA-Based Hardware Accelerated Bioinformatics Platform

Bielefeld, Germany and Carlsbad, CA—November 15, 2011. The Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at Bielefeld University has agreed to work with Active Motif to develop accelerated sequence comparison algorithms for the TimeLogic Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based DeCypher® high performance biocomputing platform. TimeLogic’s DeCypher systems greatly increase the speed of DNA and protein sequence comparison by combining FPGA based PCIe accelerator cards with high-performance servers to accelerate optimized implementations of BLAST, Smith-Waterman, HMMER and gene modeling algorithms.
According to Michael Murray, Manager of Sales & Marketing for TimeLogic products at Active Motif, “We feel very fortunate to be able to work with CeBiTec as they have tremendous expertise in large scale computing and high-performance bioinformatics. Our recently announced new hardware platform will run Tera-BLAST, our accelerated BLAST implementation, over 400 times faster than running BLAST in software.” Ted DeFrank, President of Active Motif added, “Recent advances in next-gen DNA sequencing technology have created great opportunities for our TimeLogic division and, as a result, Active Motif is investing heavily in this portion of our business. In addition to a major hardware revision, TimeLogic has several additional projects ongoing and we recognize that working with CeBiTec affords us a great opportunity to further strengthen our position as the leader in the field of FPGA-accelerated Biocomputing solutions.”

Dr. Alexander Goesmann, Executive Director of the Bioinformatics Resource Facility (BRF) at CeBiTec added, “We are really delighted about the latest TimeLogic developments and we are looking forward to collaborating on projects that are highly relevant for us. We have already deployed the TimeLogic system and integrated Tera-BLAST into our genome annotation system, GenDB, which has relieved the enormous pressure on our sizeable compute cluster. We are also working on a new platform for metagenomics that will rely heavily on the TimeLogic system.” Goesmann continued, “Our highly experienced team is excited to provide input, validation, and benchmarking for TimeLogic’s new accelerated Next Gen mapping tool and new and faster accelerated BLAST implementation. We also look forward to strengthening our relationship with Active Motif and TimeLogic as participants in future research projects”

Press Release at BioSpace