Insilicos Awarded Grant for Proteomics Supercomputing
Seattle, 15 August 2011 - Insilicos today announced that Brian Pratt has received an SBIR grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The grant is to apply massively-parallel GPGPU computing technology to proteomics. GPGPU technology uses highly-parallel processors originally developed for graphics processing to perform many computations at once, making computations run as much as 1,000 times faster. Peptide search is used to identify proteins in biological samples. Peptide search requires extensive computations, and is usually the bottleneck in proteomics data analysis. A prototype search engine suggests that GPGPU technology can be used to greatly accelerate peptide search.
"Advances in lab technology have brought proteomics within reach of many researchers," said Pratt. "Yet, analysis of results often requires access to a computer cluster costing millions of dollars. At Insilicos, our strategy is to put proteomics analysis into the hands of researchers who don't have the resources for a computer cluster. This grant will allow researchers to use the computer sitting on their desk right now as a peptide search supercomputer. We think that's pretty cool."
