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Empowers life sciences community with accelerated bioinformatics: Microsoft announced the initiation of Progeniq Pte Ltd, a leader in reconfigurable computing applications headquartered in Singapore, into the BioIT Alliance today. The BioIT Alliance is a cross-industry group working to integrate science and technology to accelerate the pace of drug discovery and realize the potential of personalized medicine. The early focus of the Alliance has been to address the data-capture and data-integration challenges that face the industry. Additional information about the BioIT Alliance can be found at its Web site. The Progeniq BioBoost provides hardware accelerated processing for the most computationally intensive applications in Bioinformatics -- NCBI BLAST, Smith Waterman, HMMer and ClustalW. Processing these protein searches will be cut from months to days, and weeks to hours and minutes. "The life sciences offer one of the best opportunities for information technology to accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development," said Rudy Potenzone, Bio IT Alliance Manager at Microsoft. "Progeniq's collaboration in the Alliance will be a tremendous boost in Bioinformatics data-processing and discoveries in the life science industry." By utilizing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology, the processor is able to 'rewire' itself on the fly according to the application that needs to be accelerated. This results in further energy savings, as the FPGA consumes as little as 5 watts of power from the USB, as compared to the racks of servers and cooling required that it replaces. "Progeniq is delighted to collaborate with Microsoft and Life Science companies in the Bio IT Alliance," said Darran Nathan, Progeniq's Chief Executive Officer. "We are confident that more users will benefit from the speedups from the BioBoost, and more in the life science industry can enjoy its benefits." The BioBoost Accelerated suite for Bioinformatics is available for immediate shipment at USD3,000 for first time buyers. Visit its Web site for details.