Early News and Notes from the Expo Floor

April 9, 2013 | The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo begins in Boston this afternoon, and the Expo hall has been bustling as the more than 125 exhibiting companies set up their booths. Here are just some of the early news and announcements coming off the Expo floor so far.

Silicon Mechanics will be showcasing its zStax StorCore 104 enterprise-class, software-defined storage solution and invites Bio-IT World attendees to see how it delivers high-performance, scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy vendors. On display will be zStax StorCore 104, an enterprise-class, software-defined storage solution built on ZFS and based on industry standard x86 hardware, which provides open, unified storage management. Industry experts Steve and Tommy Scherer will join zStax product manager Tony Vetter and a team of Silicon Mechanics engineers and specialists to demonstrate zStax and discuss how it can solve medical records and research storage challenges. Booth 399

TimeLogic will be presenting the newest update to their popular FPGA-accelerated BLAST implementation, Tera-BLAST, which is now capable of delivering over 1,200x speed-up as compared to software-only versions. “This version of Tera-BLAST, which runs on our J-Series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Similarity Search Engine, allows us to replace a cluster of dozens of high performance servers with a single DeCypher system,” commented Michael Murray, Manager of Sales & Marketing activities for TimeLogic products at Active Motif. Furthermore, “assembling multi-node DeCypher systems is a simple affair and TimeLogic already has the requisite system administration, job queuing and job distribution functionality built-into our DeCypher software, making it easy for our customers to replace a full rack of powerful servers with a small DeCypher system.” Booth 223

Accelrys is launching the Accelrys Externalized Collaboration Suite consisting of Contur ELN; Accelrys Enterprise Platform to facilitate information exchange; and HEOS, a SaaS information management and collaboration workspace that is now live on the BT for Life Science R&D cloud platform. The suite is designed specifically to address the needs of life sciences organizations engaged in externalized network research addressing technology transfer through networked collaboration to scientific informatics across all research data including experiments, chemical structures, assays and other test results. The result is a more holistic externalization strategy for partnering pharmaceutical, contract research, biotechnology and academic organizations as well as increased flexibility, reduced complexity and improved operational excellence in collaborative network research. Booth 301

See these exhibitors and over 120 more at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Keynote and exhibit hall passes are still available: http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/hallpass