Convey Computer Rolls Out Life Sciences Division

February 22, 2010

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Convey Computer Corporation, makers of the hybrid-core HC-1 Convey platform, have announced the roll out of a life sciences division to be headed up by industry veteran George Vacek, formerly of Hewlett-Packard. Convey began making its pitch to the HPC community in late 2008 at SC08 with a power-efficient rack unit that combines Intel Xeon processors with commodity FPGAs. About six months later, the University of California, San Diego decided to install the HC-1 to reduce the time to run blind search proteomics experiments on massive protein databases that look for post translation modifications. Regarding Convey's new play for the life sciences market, Vacek says that the company is focusing much of their efforts "on genomics because of the large data volumes being generated by the current generation of sequencers. And, as sequencer technology continues to improve, data volumes will continue their dramatic growth. Although genomics applications generally run fine on x86 clusters, it can be cost prohibitive to quickly complete the data analysis required to support genomics research."

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