By Bio-IT World staff
June 22, 2009 | Danish informatics company CLC bio will be unveiling the CLC Genomics Machine at the 17th annual conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Stockholm at the end of this month, Bio-IT World has learned.
The Genomics Machine is billed as the “first turnkey solution for analyzing and visualizing next-generation sequencing data,” according to the company. The solution consists of a hardware platform, pre-installed software -- including accelerated algorithms for next-gen data analysis -- and an enterprise level database.
CEO Thomas Knudsen told Bio-IT World: "We have gone in a different direction than all other teams developing and refining algorithms for analyzing the massive amounts of data coming from the NGS instruments. Instead of constantly scaling up your hardware to the point where you need very big clusters or a cloud computing setup in order to do de novo assembly of large genomes, our scientific developers started from scratch and thought out some quite clever ways of handling those large amounts of data -- to the point where a single CLC Genomics Machine can handle these tasks without breaking a sweat."
During initial benchmark testing, CLC bio claims to have produced one-fold coverage of a human genome assembly to the reference can be completed in around one hour. The solution also includes classic bioinformatics algorithms such as like BLAST, HMMsearch, HMMpfam, Smith-Waterman and ClustalW. Again, performance benchmarks algorithms are said to be favorable compared to a popular off-the-shelf biocomputing FPGA solution.
Lasse Goerlitz, CLC bio’s head of global PR and marketing, said he was excited to debut this solution at ISMB. “It's a true testament to the very high scientific level of our development team, accomplishing something previously unseen anywhere in the world,” said Goerlitz. “I think it goes well with another expression we'll be showcasing in Stockholm: ‘Rocket Science is for kids. Bioinformatics is for scientists!’"
Knudsen says the Genomics Machine marks “a big push into high-performance computing for life sciences” and predicts that existing biocomputing solutions “essentially will be left in the dark with the performance we’re going to deliver.”
CLC bio expects soon to announce a partnership “with one of the premier technologies available” to expand its enterprise platform.