Transmeta (Semiconductor) (TMTA)

[UKBird]

RLX Technologies and Platform Partner to Offer Platform Clusterware on RLX Systems for Bioinformatics Industry

New York, NY and Tucson, AZ, January 28, 2002- RLX Technologies, the industry leader in high density blade computing platforms, and Platform Computing Inc., the global leader in distributed computing software, announced today that they have entered into an agreement that allows RLX to offer Platform Clusterware as part of the RLX BLAST Cluster Solution. Together the RLX compute platform and Platform Clusterware will facilitate scale-out compute clusters that enable processing of BLAST jobs for bioinformatics customers.

"RLX systems, with Platform Clusterware, offers industry leading low operational cost solutions for searching of genomic and proteomic databases in scale out bioinformatics computing to customers who require high-throughput but also want to run additional bioinformatics applications on RLX's Linux cluster platform," said Scott Farrand, Vice President of Software Engineering at RLX. "With the growing popularity of Linux clusters, workload, resource, and performance management has become increasingly important. Platform Clusterware provides a comprehensive solution to this need. The ServerBlade technology leadership of RLX, along with Platform's leadership in clustering software is the basis of this exciting partnership."

"In the life sciences, where Linux adoption is growing rapidly, it is critical to have a highly reliable and available IT infrastructure to accelerate speed to discovery," said Yury Rozenman, Life Sciences, Business Development Manager at Platform. "Clusterware, integrated with RLX's solution will help bioinformatics firms increase productivity and performance and reduce administration costs through effective cluster management."

The new bioinformatics solution product from RLX includes all of the components necessary to build a compute cluster for performing BLAST searches and facilitating large-scale problems of interest to academic, biotech, and pharmaceutical biologists. This RLX system will be based on RLX's ServerBlade 667 with Red Hat 7.2 installed, and will consist of one 10GB disk drive, along with a choice of 512MB or 1GB of RAM.

The industry's first hardware-independent, commercially supported solution for Linux cluster management, Platform Clusterware easily integrates with and compliments existing Linux solutions to provide a comprehensive solution with workload management, system monitoring, administration, and provisioning (installation and configuration) capabilities. Platform Clusterware integrates components from Platform's flagship workload management software, Platform LSF; its resource management software, Platform SiteAssure; and server provisioning capabilities. 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 whole cluster.

The BLAST algorithm, developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), is the sequence search algorithm most commonly used by genomic researchers. Scripts from RLX automate the cluster configuration process, while scripts and utilities from Platform automate the search process. These tools together facilitate easy deployment and usage of compute clusters for bioinformatic research.

Platform is the world's leading distributed computing software provider, with desktop to Grid solutions that allow organizations to dramatically improve time to market and quality of results, while maximizing their IT investment. Platform has strategic relationships with industry leaders and its open, scalable software solutions are the choice of more than 1,500 result-driven organizations around the world. Platform is an independent company with 400 employees in 14 offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information about Platform, please visit www.platform.com.