Cray Teams with South African Bioinformatics Institute

SEATTLE, WA -- Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today announced that the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), in collaboration with Cray programmers, has paved the way for higher-quality EST clustering by making it practical to apply SANBI's widely used D2-cluster software to whole datasets instead of data samples. By exploiting special hardware designed into Cray SV1 supercomputers for the intelligence community, a team under the direction of SANBI Director Winston Hide achieved a 450 percent per-processor speedup of D2-cluster over the fastest previously tested multiprocessor computer. The speedup makes it possible to process more data and produce higher-quality, less error-prone scientific results. EST (Expressed Sequence Tag) clustering is a widespread method used to discover new genes and analyze how they work-how the genes are expressed and regulated. An EST is a tiny portion of a gene that serves as a marker to help identify the gene's location, structure and function. Higher-quality EST clustering could accelerate understanding of the genetic bases of diseases and lead to more-effective drugs and medical treatments. "With this speedup, we can now apply the very high fidelity of the exhaustive version of D2-cluster to return the highest-quality results possible on a dataset of all known human transcripts," said Dr. Hide. "As a result of the Cray-SANBI implementation, we are now able to consider making the most exhaustively manufactured version of an expressed human gene index." "Cray approached SANBI for this important collaboration because of the unique expertise and global reputation of Winston Hide and his colleagues," explained Bart Mellenbergh, Cray's bioinformatics practice leader for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "SANBI has substantial, world-class experience in developing genome algorithms for high-performance computing systems." "We look forward to further pioneering achievements from this collaboration, especially after a Cray SV1 supercomputer becomes available on site to SANBI scientists later this month. It's exciting to be collaborating with this talented group and to know that SANBI's mission is enthusiastically supported by a leading institution like University of the Western Cape," said Cray Chairman and CEO James Rottsolk.