ARSC and Cray Release Portable BioLibrary

Submitted by Jenn Wagaman
Phone: 907/474-6551
08/26/03

ARSC and Cray Release Portable BioLibrary The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) announced this week the release of a new portable version of the Cray Bioinformatics Library (CBL). The library, which was developed in cooperation with Cray Inc. by ARSC MPP Specialist James Long, contains the same functions as the CBL, but is also compatible with hardware systems other than Cray.

The original CBL is a set of fundamental library routines that take advantage of proprietary Cray hardware to implement some common nucleotide/protein sequence manipulations typical in a bioinformatics context. This library was optimized for the Cray SV1» and Cray X1»platforms and is available from Cray. The Portable CBL is written in C and implements the computational primitives of the original library in a generic fashion with little regard to specific hardware. The Portable CBL routines facilitate performance by operating on compressed data whenever possible.

"It has been a wonderful opportunity for ARSC to work together with Cray Inc. to contribute to the field of bioinformatics," said ARSC director Frank Williamse hope to see this library continue to grow as additional biological computational primitives are identified and implemented."

The Portable Cray Bioinformatics Library was made available on SourceForge.net and can be downloaded for use by researchers at cbl.sourceforge.net.

About ARSC The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, located on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, supports computational research in science and engineering with emphasis on high latitudes and the Arctic. The center provides high performance computational, visualization, networking and data storage resources for researchers within the University of Alaska, other academic institutions, the Department of Defense and other government agencies. ARSC is a Shared Resource Center in the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program. For additional information about ARSC, go to http://www.arsc.edu .

About Cray Inc. Cray is the premier provider of supercomputing solutions for customers’ most challenging scientific and engineering problems. Go to www.cray.com for more information about the company.