For Immediate Release—Bielefeld, Germany and Carlsbad, CA—Jan 27, 2014.
The Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at Bielefeld University has added TimeLogic’s latest
J-series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware to their computational tools
platform. TimeLogic’s DeCypher systems greatly increase the speed of sequence comparison
by combining custom FPGA circuitry with optimized implementations of BLAST, Smith-
Waterman, Hidden Markov Model and gene modeling algorithms.
According to Michael Murray, Manager of Sales & Marketing for TimeLogic products at Active
Motif, “This purchase represents the expansion of an existing DeCypher system and we’re
very proud of the fact that CeBiTec, like so many of our TimeLogic customers, continues to
update their DeCypher platform with the inclusion of our latest FPGA hardware. This J-series
FPGA platform will run Tera-BLAST, our accelerated BLAST implementation, many hundreds
of times faster than the software-only version”. Ted DeFrank, President of Active Motif also
added, “The TimeLogic brand is the one of the original pioneers in the field of accelerated
bioinformatics. We’re very excited about this latest hardware revision as it will once again
catapult TimeLogic far ahead of any other accelerated biocomputing solution and further
strengthen our position as the leader in the field.”
According to Prof. Dr. Alexander Goesmann, who was responsible as principal investigator
for the acquisition of the systems and has recently been appointed professor at Giessen
University, a broad range of analysis workflows in the research areas of genome annotation,
comparative genomics and metagenomics relying on sequence similarity searches can now
be greatly accelerated. Dr. Stefan Albaum, Executive Director of the Bioinformatics Resource
Facility (BRF) at CeBiTec, added “We are really excited about the latest products from
TimeLogic – not least since these systems allow us to release significant compute capacities
on our general compute cluster for other Bioinformatics applications.”
About CeBiTec
The CeBiTec is a central academic institution at Bielefeld University, Germany dedicated to
interdisciplinary research in life sciences. It aims to encourage and support the creation of
innovative projects that cross discipline boundaries. For this purpose it consolidates research
activities in the fields of biotechnology, molecular biology, genome research, systems
biology, biochemistry, nano- and biophysics, as well as bioinformatics and computer science.
With respect to the scientific alliance of genome research and computer science, CeBiTec
strives to provide both concrete bioinformatics support to ongoing research projects in
genomics, and fundamental algorithms and tools applicable in the worldwide bioinformatics
community. The Technology Platform Bioinformatics provides general hardware and software
support for 400 researchers of the CeBiTec and more than 1,500 cooperation partners
worldwide within genome and post genome projects.
About Bielefeld University
Bielefeld University was founded in 1969 with an explicit research assignment and a mission
to provide high-quality research-oriented teaching. Today it encompasses 13 faculties
covering a broad spectrum of disciplines in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences,
and technology. With about 19,500 students in 105 degree courses (in German) and 2,750
staff (including approx. 1,600 academic staff) it is one of Germany’s medium-sized
universities.
Since its foundation the University has been guided by the paradigm of interdisciplinarity, as
today’s complex problems can no longer be adequately tackled through mono-disciplinary
approaches alone. Here interdisciplinarity stands for a spectrum of multiperspective
approaches of different kinds and intensities. As the architectural expression of its
interdisciplinarity, the University unites - uniquely in Germany - almost all its departments in a
single building. This striking structure brings people working in different disciplines together
in close proximity. The culture of communication fostered between students and teaching
staff as well as between researchers, management, and administration is characterized by
great openness towards new and unconventional ideas. Thus, it is not surprising that
Bielefeld University has been one of the first places world-wide to establish the emerging
discipline of bioinformatics both in research and education.
About TimeLogic
TimeLogic, a division of Active Motif, Inc, is the world leader in accelerating genome
annotation tools using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. The blend of
powerful hardware with optimized bioinformatics applications produces a perfect
combination of performance, accuracy and value. These DeCypherTM systems are also simple
to use & maintain and scale easily. Utilizing a TimeLogic system reduces pressure on overused
CPU-clusters by off-loading BLAST, Smith-Waterman (SW) and Hidden Markov Model
(HMM) tasks to a highly time and energy efficient solution. From the earliest genome
sequencing projects in the 1990’s to the largest metagenomics projects undertaken to date,
TimeLogic has provided the enabling technology to make this research possible.
Active Motif/TimeLogic operates globally through its corporate headquarters in Carlsbad,
California, European headquarters in Rixensart, Belgium and Japanese headquarters in
Tokyo, Japan. Active Motif/TimeLogic applies a multi-disciplinary approach to create new
and modify existing technologies to meet the current and future needs of life science
researchers.
Find out more by visiting us at http://www.timelogic.com or contact Michael
Murray at [email protected].