Prometheus Alliance announced to promote HPC appliances in bioinformatics

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insideHPC has an exclusive early look today at an announcement scheduled to go out to the world tomorrow. The news is from Tycrid Platform Technologies, a maker of GPU-based systems for bioinformatics applications. Tomorrow they’ll announce the Prometheus Alliance (www.prometheusalliance.org) which, according to the press release is

…a “limited collaboration alliance focused on developing new High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions for Bioinformatics, the application of advanced computing technology for managing and analyzing genomic and biological data.”

According to Chris Heier, President of Tycrid Platform Technologies, “The Prometheus Alliance is being established to address a specific challenge that continues to impede the progress of scientific discovery – the lack of scalable, purpose-built appliances. I feel this is critical as we can virtually eliminate the need for scientists to become computer scientists. Our goal is to take a fresh, innovative approach to developing HPC solutions that do one thing really well – address specific computational challenges for bioinformatics.”

Increasing domain-based specialization is a trend that many are predicting will be needed for effective exascale tools (in the form of domain-specific languages, for example). Certainly offering a bundled appliance targeted at a specific domain is one way to potentially increase market penetration for HPC, an outcome we are very much in favor of. Acceleware has tried something that is at least conceptually similar with GPU-based solutions in the oil/gas and electromagnetic simulation markets. I’m looking forward to spending some time with them at SC09 to find out more about the Alliance and what exactly it will be up to.

Comments

  1. Hey John:

    You might want to fix the URL for http://www.prometheusalliance.org.

    Thanks!

    Bernard

  2. Fixed…forgot the http…