Sun Tests Starfire Server On FastA Application

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Sun Microsystems reported that its Starfire Server performed favorably running sequence comparisons using a bioinformatics application. The test consisted of comparing two genome sequences using FastA, a modular set of DNA/protein sequence comparison programs developed by William Pearson of the University of Virginia. Sun said its server performed a Smith-Waterman comparison of every E. coli gene with every gene in the blue-green algae Synechocystis in less than 20 minutes, demonstrating "excellent scalability for the out-of-the-box version of FastA, achieving 45x speedup with 64 processors. Sun said the server performed the sequence comparisons at a rate of over 1.2 billion cells per second.