LOUISVILLE, Colo., March 7, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- In a collaborative effort with the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC), Massively Parallel Technologies, Inc. (MPT) achieved astounding reductions in processing times for the Center's GeneSpeed research team and increased the biological significance of the GeneSpeed database. The unique speed and scalability of MPT's BioTech Virtual Power Center (VPC) allowed the GeneSpeed team to complete work that was heretofore impractical, and greatly expand the scope and size of their GeneSpeed database project.
According to Dr. Jan Jensen, Assistant Professor and Director of the UCHSC Bioinformatics Core, "The Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Denver has been extremely pleased with the collaboration with Massively Parallel Technologies in developing GeneSpeed. Without MPT's BioTech VPC, the data analysis required for the population of the GeneSpeed database would not have been possible. The task was immense, but with the power of the supercomputing capacity at MPT, we were not only able to complete the work but also to significantly expand the task."
The initial work consisted of using tBLASTn to compare approximately 300,000 protein sequences against the Mus musculus (M. musculus, or mouse) Unigene database from NCBI. The mouse Unigene database consists of 42,555 nucleotide sequences found in the mouse genome. This work, previously done at their lab facility on a single 3.4GHz Pentium 4, took almost a month of solid computing time to complete. Using MPT's BioTech VPC, the research team was able to produce the same output in just 5 days.
The GeneSpeed team realized that the processing power from the MPT BioTech VPC would allow them to greatly expand the scope of their work. The database was expanded from the one database (M. musculus) to four, including: M. musculus, Homo sapiens (human), Drosophila melanogaster (fly), and Caenorhabditis elegans (worm). This increased the number of candidate protein sequences from 300,000 to 2.5 million -- an 8-fold increase -- and expanded the searchable database by over 300 percent. Again using the MPT BioTech VPC, this new larger dataset and workload was completed in 15 days, a job that the UCHSC team estimates would have taken two to three years to complete on UCHSC's existing system, making it impractical to complete on their own.
The MPT BioTech VPC provided the GeneSpeed database team with the computing resources to meet their project workload and allowed them to expand the scope and size of their project beyond what they thought possible, further increasing the biological value and significance of the GeneSpeed database. The GeneSpeed database has currently opened for beta-testing, and interested users may request a password directly on the site. For more information on the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes GeneSpeed project: http://genespeed.uchsc.edu/.
About Massively Parallel Technologies, Inc.
Massively Parallel Technologies (MPT), a Colorado-based company, delivers high-performance computing through Virtual Power Centers, Internet-based hubs designed for specific computationally intense applications. Powered by HOWARD(tm), MPT's revolutionary system design and software solution provides the fastest possible communication between multiple processors. MPT's Virtual Power Centers can outperform most mainframes and supercomputers for a fraction of the cost. For additional information on Massively Parallel Technologies' products and services, call (303) 926-8555 or visit its Web site at www.massivelyparallel.com.
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