University of Giessen enhances their genome analysis capability with the addition of TimeLogic’s FPGA-based Biocomputing platform

This sophisticated technology will help University of Giessen scientists in their efforts to investigate the biotechnological potential of various microorganisms as well as insects and develop rapid and cost-effective screening systems for the presence and spread of particular pathogenicity factors found in bacterial clinical isolates.

TimeLogic’s DeCypher systems greatly increase the speed of sequence comparison by combining custom field programmable gate array (FPGA) circuitry with optimized implementations of BLAST. With the inclusion of this hardware from TimeLogic, University of Giessen researchers have significantly enhanced their high-throughput genome annotation efforts. According to Michael Murray, Manager of Sales & Marketing for TimeLogic products at Active Motif, “Our customer at University of Giessen, Prof. Dr. Alexander Goesmann has been a TimeLogic customer for a long time and we’re thrilled that he’s chosen to incorporate our latest FPGA hardware revision into his sizeable compute facility.”

Ted DeFrank, President of Active Motif added, “Recent advances in next-generation DNA sequencing technology have created great opportunities for our TimeLogic division and, as a result, Active Motif is investing heavily in this portion of our business. In addition to a major hardware revision, TimeLogic has several additional projects ongoing and we are excited about their continuation as we strive to further strengthen our position as the leader in the field of FPGA-accelerated Biocomputing solutions.”

Prof. Dr. Alexander Goesmann, “professor for bioinformatics and systems biology at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen” added, “We are really delighted about the reliability and performance of our TimeLogic systems and we are looking forward to collaborating on projects that are highly relevant for us. An ambitious goal in this respect is to acquire the capacity to analyze 1,000 genomes per day. We have already deployed the TimeLogic system and integrated Tera-BLAST into our software platform EDGAR for large-scale genome comparisons, which has relieved the enormous pressure on our sizeable compute cluster. We also utilize the TimeLogic system to accelerate metagenome analysis that is conducted with our in-house developed software platform MGX.” Goesmann continued, “Our growing team of bioinformaticians is excited to extend the utilization of the TimeLogic systems and incorporate it into new applications that are currently under development in our group. This includes the provisioning of a scalable sequence analysis pipeline within the de.NBI Cloud computing environment that is currently established as part of the  German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI). We also look forward to strengthening our relationship with Active Motif and TimeLogic as participants in future research projects”.

About TimeLogic

TimeLogic, a division of Active Motif, Inc, is the world leader in hardware accelerated bioinformatics search tools which accelerate genome annotation by combining optimized bioinformatics applications with powerful FPGA-based PCIe accelerator cards. This blend of specialized hardware and optimized software provides a perfect combination of performance, accuracy and value. Furthermore, these systems are simple to maintain and scale easily. Utilizing a TimeLogic system reduces pressure on over-used CPU-clusters by off-loading BLAST, Smith-Waterman (SW) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) tasks to a highly time and energy efficient solution. From the earliest genome sequencing projects in the 1990’s to the largest Metagenomics projects undertaken to date, TimeLogic has provided the enabling technology to make this research possible. Active Motif/TimeLogic operates globally through its corporate headquarters in Carlsbad, California,  European headquarters in La Hulpe, Belgium and Japanese headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. Active Motif/TimeLogic applies a multi-disciplinary approach to create new and modify existing technologies to meet the current and future needs of life science researchers.