RLX Technologies announces new bioinformatics BLAST solutionHouston 05 March 2002 RLX Technologies has launched the RLX BLAST Cluster Solution featuring Platform Clusterware running on RLX Systems. The RLX compute platform utilises Platform Clusterware to facilitate scale-out compute clusters that process BLAST jobs for bioinformatics research.
The RLX BLAST Cluster Solution lowers total operational costs and provides faster times to solution compared to conventional clusters. The RLX BLAST solution utilises the capability and convenience of ServerBlades to reduce time to discovery. Simply plugging-in five, 10 or 24 RLX BLAST ServerBlades into RLX chassis creates a bioinformatics compute cluster. To efficiently manage the BLAST compute cluster, the solution leverages RLX Control Tower 2 and Platform's Clusterware, resulting in lower IT costs. The RLX partnership with Platform Computing Inc. allows research environments to achieve faster results and lower costs through scale-out compute clusters.
This BLAST Cluster solution is engineered for the bioinformatics industry to perform BLAST searches and facilitate large-scale projects for academic, biotech and pharmaceutical biologists. The solution builds upon the RLX ServerBlade, then integrates the Clusterware components from Platform's flagship workload management software (Platform LSF), and its resource management software, Platform SiteAssure.
To monitor and provision the BLAST solution blades, the customer can use an intuitive management system called RLX Control Tower 2, a multi-chassis management and provisioning tool for the ServerBlade architecture. This management system provides a complete view of their systems using the easy navigation of the Control Tower 2 graphical interface, either locally or remotely. This end-to-end solution combines proactive system monitoring and administration, plus load balancing, fault tolerance, job scheduling and remote Web access to manage distributed workload processing across the entire cluster.
The BLAST algorithm, developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), is the sequence search algorithm most commonly used by genomic researchers for locating specific patterns in huge DNA and protein databases. Finding a needle in a haystack with billions of entries takes a lot of time, even with smart software. To complete the robust RLX solution, the Web-based RLX Control Tower 2, used with Platform Clusterware on RLX ServerBlades is the perfect, easy to use solution to manage and optimize a BLAST cluster.
RLX BLAST Cluster Solution bundles are available in two options. Each bundle consists of one RLX System 300ex, one RLX Control Tower Blade 2, five RLX BLAST Cluster ServerBlades (available with different RAM configurations), and five RLX Control Tower 2 user licenses, priced up to $16,900. The RLX BLAST Cluster ServerBlade is also individually priced up to $2,750 (available with different RAM configurations). RLX BLAST Cluster Solution is ready to order today, and will ship in late March 2002, with availability on the RLX ServerBlade 667 to follow.
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