TurboGenomics is partnering with Entropia to enable its TurboBlast accelerated sequence comparison software to run on networks of tens of thousands of desktop PCs.
TurboBlast partitions Blast computations into smaller tasks and distributes them to a cluster of computers that executes them in parallel. Andrew Sherman, vice president of operations at TurboGenomics, said TurboBlast already runs on clusters of several hundred nodes, but that the company hadnt yet focused on large corporate networks of 5,000-10,000 PCs.
Sherman was confident that TurboBlast would scale up fairly easily with few modifications.
According to Entropia, its distributed computing technology not only provides scalability, but also addresses security issues by sealing off the application from other files on each desktop machine and offers improved management of CPU and disk usage. Entropia has several pilot projects running at pharmaceutical and biotech companies, but has not yet signed a paying customer in this market.
Entropia said it has invested in similar partnerships with other application providers. Our goal is to support as many applications as possible to give customers the highest degree of computing capability, said Entropia CEO Robert North.
Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.
The Entropia-compatible version of TurboBlast is expected to be available by the third quarter of 2001.
BT