TurboGenomics releases TurboBLAST

By Editor on Apr 24, 2001

According to TurboGenomics, TurboBLAST is an accelerated, parallel implementation of BLAST, a sequence comparison tool designed to provide researchers with an insight into the structure and function of genes and proteins.

"TurboBLAST fundamentally changes the way scientists approach genomics
research by enabling them to run large, comprehensive homology searches that
would have been impractical and often impossible using normal BLAST," said
Gregory Gardiner, President and CEO of TurboGenomics. "With TurboBLAST, scientists will no longer have to compromise research goals due to limitations of their IT infrastructure."

The TurboBLAST solution is designed to partition BLAST computations into manageable tasks and distributes them across a network of workstations, PCs or MACs. In addition, TurboBLAST is designed to enable life sciences researchers to; transform existing heterogeneous collections of hardware into a high-performance, cost-effective BALST super-computer; execute complex queries that are typically possible only at advanced supercomputer centers; accelerate identification of a broader range of novel genes and proteins; scale up indefinitely to meet expanding BLAST processing needs; streamline BLAST workflow and manage all facets of the BLAST process through a Web-based interface; compare new data sets with previous results; and achieve cost-savings in terms of hardware and man-hours.

"TurboBLAST allowed us to avoid a BLAST bottleneck in our HAP Marker discovery process as our production capacity greatly increased over the past year," said Richard Judson, Senior Vice President of Informatics at Genaissance Pharmaceuticals. "We had been anticipating a huge backlog of BLAST jobs waiting to run. With TurboBLAST, we've been able to run more BLAST queries at an accelerated rate without having to make a large investment in supercomputing hardware. Now our BLAST processing easily keeps up with the other operations in our high-throughput production environment."

The TurboBLAST solution is based on Java technology and designed to run on all types of computers.