The Bioinformatics Data Overload
Life Sciences education and research requires high performance computing infrastructure, such as clusters. With the large and increasing size of Bioinformatics databases, applications often require months of processing time per data set.
As an example, the GenBank database has been growing at a rate of a doubling every 12 months. There is a corresponding need for an increasing amount of computational power to analyze all that data.
Introducing BioBoost
The Progeniq BioBoost turbo-charges applications such as Pairwise and Multiple Sequence Alignment with performance of over 20 equivalent 2.4GHz CPU cores from a single accelerator.
This is done by leveraging on a reconfigurable hardware processor that can 'rewire' itself on the fly according to whichever application needs to be accelerated. Such processors are technically known as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
Removing Bottlenecks to Increase Workflow Throughput
The BioBoost accelerator can speed up specific applications, depending on how well such applications lend themselves to parallelization on FPGAs.
To maximize the use of such hardware accelerators as well as computational clusters, there is a balance that should be achieved in terms of leveraging on the BioBoost accelerators to remove computational bottlenecks so as to maximize throughput with the rest of the cluster.
Read More