NEWS BRIEFS
Pasadena, CA — Paracel Inc., a Celera Genomics business, today introduced GeneMatcher2(TM), a new generation high-throughput supercomputer offering increased sensitivity and performance in sequence similarity analysis.
A single GeneMatcher2, about the size of an average suitcase, contains more than 27,000 programmable parallel processors. It executes some of the most sensitive and selective algorithms, such as Smith-Waterman and Hidden Markov Models, for biological data searches, analysis and gene finding at speeds thousands of times faster than the latest generation microprocessor.
“Over the past two years, industrial-scale, automated sequencing has accelerated the sequencing of the human genome and biological research in general,” said Kwang-I Yu, Ph.D., president of Paracel. “The issues now are to compare, annotate, and understand the massive amounts of data being generated. To do so effectively, we need to leapfrog current computing technology, and build tools that can keep pace with databases that are doubling in size every few months. GeneMatcher2 makes it feasible to apply some of the most sensitive algorithms to industrial-scale genomic problems, yielding results in a matter of minutes that might otherwise have taken months or even years to execute. We believe that this product will have a significant impact on pharmaceutical and biotechnological research.”
GeneMatcher2 incorporates the latest electronic and bioinformatics technology, as well as lessons learned from its predecessors – GeneMatcher1 and GeneMatcher-Plus. GeneMatcher-Plus, currently operating at 40 pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic sites worldwide, is the leading bioinformatics hardware accelerator. GeneMatcher2 offers increased acceleration, higher throughput, better price/performance ratio, lower start-up costs and more configuration options.
Introduced in 1997, Paracel’s GeneMatcher was the first computer designed for commercial use with custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology to specifically analyze genetic information. GeneMatcher computers precisely analyze similarities and differences of DNA or protein sequences in relation to other sequences of known genetic location and function. These comparisons provide researchers with critical insights for drug discovery and other genetic research applications. The GeneMatcher system is a plug-and-play computation server that can be connected to any network. It is delivered with a full suite of software tools from Paracel allowing GeneMatcher to be easily used in any bioinformatics environment.
Paracel provides high-performance genomic data and text analysis systems for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and government markets. Paracel is a business unit of Celera Genomics, an Applera Corporation business. Paracel is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif.
Web site: http://www.paracel.com
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