Aspera said this week that the Japanese National Institute of Genetics has deployed its web-based Aspera Connect Server to support international research collaborations involving high-throughput DNA sequencing and data analysis.
Japan's NIG operates research centers such as the Bioresources Center, the DNA Data Bank of Japan, and the DNA Sequencing Center.
According to Aspera, its offering will enable researchers to distribute and exchange large datasets — up to 20 gigabytes in size each — with institutions such as the European Bioinformatics Institute and the National Center for Biotechnology Information on a daily basis.
Furthermore, a web-based directory will allow researchers to browse the data they need to access, and an install-on-demand browser plug-in enables high-speed uploads and downloads from within the user's browser, Aspera said.
"Our purpose is to provide DNA information, an analysis environment, computing resources, and data transfer to researchers as quickly as possible," Toshihisa Takagi, a professor at NIG's DNA Data Bank of Japan, explained in a statement.
"With Aspera we are able to consistently transfer at our full available bandwidth of 1 Gbps while respecting other important internet traffic," he said.
Additionally, "because of the simplicity of the software with user-friendly web and desktop GUIs, our researchers are able to immediately move data online without a great deal of training," he said.
Japan's NIG is the second life science group to recently tap Aspera's solutions for use in genomics-related activities.
Last week at the Bio-IT world conference in Boston, Aspera announced that the BGI's newly launched cloud-based software-as-a-service solution, EasyGenomics, uses its file transferring technology and Connect server solutions (BI 4/27/2012).