DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /    ( Table of Contents )

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UNIVERSITY OF YORK INSTALLS VITA NUOVA'S INFERNO GRID

Vita Nuova announced that The University of York Department of Biology (England) has installed an Inferno Grid to aid their research. The Inferno Grid will be used to support distributed computation for sequence matching using BLAST and biomolecular simulations using CHARMM (Chemistry at Harvard Molecular Mechanics).

The Inferno Grid co-ordinates the execution of applications such as BLAST and CHARMM across clusters of UNIX, Linux and Windows machines. The computing power can come from either dedicated computing clusters or the Inferno Grid will use idle cycles from under-utilized work-stations. The Inferno Grid comes complete with easy to use Grid management tools that enable jobs to be started, stopped, suspended and resumed. Graphical interfaces provide administrators with a real-time analysis of the "state of the Grid."

"Distributed (Grid) computing has developed a reputation for being hard to do right, particularly to support existing applications across existing computing infrastructure," said Leo Caves, University of York Department of Biology. "As bio-scientists we are interested in computing to support our research, rather than it becoming the subject of our research. Our experience with Vita Nuova, is that the Inferno Grid is a natural solution for Grid-based computing. The ease of deployment, its flexibility and robustness are testament to this. We will continue to work with Vita Nuova to explore the possibilities for Inferno in bio-computing."

"It has been very satisfying to collaborate with the Department of Biology to solve a real problem," said Michael Jeffrey, CEO of Vita Nuova. "The installation of the Inferno Grid and the integration of BLAST and CHARMM was accomplished in a day; neither application had to be modified to take advantage of the Inferno Grid. We will continue to extend the range of applications supported by the Inferno Grid and to work with York and other Universities to provide efficacious solutions to their distribution problems."

Vita Nuova is targeting the life and bio-science companies amongst others for whom the management of their computation resources is an important challenge. The company expects to see more general application of its Grid technology in the area of Data Grids and Instrument Grids.

A collection of Grid demonstrations is available on the Vita Nuova website at www.vitanuova.com/solutions/grid/index.html that illustrate how Inferno can be used to access resources as varied as computation, services, data and devices that are distributed around the network. Inferno itself is free to download from the Vita Nuova web site at www.vitanuova.com/inferno. Further information on BLAST and CHARMM can be obtained from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/ and http://yuri.harvard.edu/, respectively.