Paracel Announces 64-bit Paracel BLAST™ 1.6 for AMD Opteron™

Pasadena, Calif. – May 11, 2004 - Paracel, Inc.(R), a business unit of the Celera Genomics Group of Applera Corporation and a leading provider of Applied High-Performance Computing™ solutions, today announced the availability of Paracel BLAST™ 1.6 with native support for 64-bit AMD Opteron™. With this new support, Paracel can offer BlastMachine2™, its integrated, turnkey cluster for BLAST analysis, with a choice of platforms to meet the individual objectives and computing environment of each customer.

“We are always looking for ways to enhance performance and provide our customers with products that will improve their research,” said Marc Rieffel, senior manager, R&D, at Paracel. “Our customers, leading research institutions and pharmaceutical companies, wanted the capability to integrate AMD Opteron into their research environment to take advantage of the ability to run 32- and 64-bit applications. With AMD64 support for Paracel BLAST we can further expand the capabilities and improve the performance of our systems.”

BlastMachine2 is an integrated turnkey Linux cluster optimized for BLAST sequence analysis. By combining optimizations of Paracel BLAST with the cost-effectiveness of Linux clusters, BlastMachine2 can deliver increased price/performance while enabling customers to handle rapidly expanding genomic datasets including GenBank.

Paracel BLAST 1.6 for AMD Opteron and BlastMachine2 with AMD Opteron processors are both available immediately. BlastMachine2 is also available with Intel(R) Xeon™ processors.

About Paracel BLAST Paracel BLAST is an enhanced version of NCBI BLAST software that has been re-engineered specifically to take advantage of the distributed processing capabilities of large-scale cluster systems. Paracel BLAST eliminates significant performance bottlenecks without sacrificing accuracy, sensitivity or selectivity. This enables researchers to search queries 100 times larger than NCBI BLAST and work with large-scale databases. Paracel BLAST accomplishes this by automatically grouping large numbers of small queries together (query packing), segmenting large database so that sequences even larger than the physical RAM of the system can be processed (database splitting), and efficiently distributing computational tasks among available processors.

About Paracel, Inc. Paracel (http://www.paracel.com) is a leading provider of applied high-performance computing solutions to solve the most technically challenging problems. Founded in 1992 to commercialize high-volume data analysis technology, Paracel today is a premier provider of integrated turnkey systems and software for over 500 customers worldwide. Paracel is headquartered in Pasadena, California and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Celera Genomics.

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