News Briefs - Hardware:

ARSC Releases 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 Williams. "We hope to see this library continue to grow as additional biological computational primitives are identified and implemented."