Researchers demonstrated their innovative ability to analyse large-scale genomic data in real time using intercontinental distributed computing resources
InforSense has been recognised for its outstanding software technology in a prestigious competition organised by the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
Discovery Net, funded by the UK e-Science Programme and powered by InforSense's integrated Kensington Discovery Edition platform, won the 'Most Innovative Data Intensive Application' award in the High Performance Computing Challenge at the Conference in a head-to-head challenge of six finalist teams.
The announcement and awards ceremony was held in Baltimore, Maryland, USA at the 15th Annual Supercomputing Conference and Exhibition (SC2002).
The Discovery Net Project is one of the UK's key e-Science pilot projects.
Based at Imperial College in London, the project focuses on the development of technology for real-time scientific and business analysis.
InforSense is an IT partner for the Project while DeltaDot provides high-throughput sequencing technologies.
For the challenge, Discovery Net researchers demonstrated their innovative ability to analyse large-scale genomic data in real time using intercontinental distributed computing resources.
In the live demo conducted from Baltimore, they showed how data generated from high-throughput malarial DNA-sequencing systems operating in London could be combined, in real time, with reference genomic data on the internet, and submitted for integrated analysis on a Grid-based computing infrastructure. Linking multiple databases and servers from locations in Denmark, Hungary, UK and USA, the demo highlighted KDE's advantage for exploiting diverse information and computation resources available worldwide to greatly accelerate genomic analysis. "With the availability of such advanced computational technologies for networking, data analysis, visualisation and Grid computing, researchers now have the power to analyse high throughput biological data in real time.
The application is obvious for addressing some of the world1s most pressing unmet medical needs, attacking the genetic causes of illnesses such as malaria, tuberculosis and Aids," said Prof Yike Guo, CEO of InforSense and principal investigator of the Discovery Net project.
Guo's co-principal investigator and CEO of DeltaDot, Dr John Hassard commented: "Advanced computation platforms can be applied to a wide range of problems: in Discovery Net we are using the same computing tools to process information from our pollution detection systems as well as our high-throughput sequencing.
To my knowledge, Discovery Net is the first Grid-based system for real time data analysis.
We believe that many - perhaps most - information-intensive problems in science could be solved using these technologies." "The Discovery Net project is building the next generation of knowledge discovery informatics platform,ý said Dr Moustafa Ghanem, project manager of Discovery Net, "The project's collaboration with InforSense brings a wealth of high quality proven data mining, data integration and Grid computing to researchers in many disciplines."
