Active Motif's TimeLogic said this week that Bielefeld University's Center for Biotechnology has purchased one of its DeCypher systems to support research aimed at discovering new functions of genes and proteins.
TimeLogic’s DeCypher systems use a combination of field programmable gate array-based PCIe accelerator cards and servers to run implementations of Blast, Smith-Waterman, hidden Markov model, and gene modeling algorithms.
Alexander Goesmann, executive director of the bioinformatics resource facility at CeBiTec, said that the institute is "confident that the new systems will boost our compute capacities to facilitate the analysis of microbial and eukaryotic genomes as well as metagenomes” as well as to mine biological data repositories.
Goesmanm said that the DeCypher system has already reduced "the time needed for a full-blown annotation of a bacterial genome" from several hours to less than an hour.
He expects that there will be "further improvements" to the system once the center's "internal compute job processing and scheduling" are optimized.