First commercially-available service of high performance computing plugin

AUCKLAND, New Zealand and PALO ALTO, Calif. Nov. 24 — Biomatters Ltd. and GreenButton Limited successfully completed the transfer of Biomatters' MrBayes/ClustalW acceleration plugin for Geneious Pro from the outgoing Linux-based New Zealand Supercomputing Center (NZSC) to Windows Azure, becoming the first to host a commercially-available service using the MPI framework on Windows Azure. The algorithms used by the plugin are based on the MPI (Message Passing Interface) protocol, which is typically used in high performance computing for scientific research.

"We have seen a significant speedup moving from the New Zealand supercomputer when running on a single 8 core node in Windows Azure," said Dave Fellows, chief technology officer for GreenButton. "When dedicated high performance computing hardware is available on the Azure platform, we will see further increase in scalability performance. One of the major advantages with this port to Windows Azure is that customers can now offload as many parallel sequencing jobs to the cloud for processing, while being able to continue working on their PC."

Biomatters has collaborated with GreenButton, the 2011 Windows Azure Global Partner of the Year, to migrate the Geneious GreenButton plugin from NZSC to Windows Azure. Biomatters leveraged GreenButton's software development kit (SDK) to port Geneious to the GreenButton platform. The SDK allowed Biomatters to rapidly move to the new platform which is exposed over a REST or SOAP API.

"I am impressed that we have managed to transfer these Linux-based algorithms to Azure with ease," said Chief Operating Officer, Quentin Christie of Biomatters. "In addition to the rapid deployment, the migration of our plugin provides us with choice on which cloud platform provider we want to utilize. The GreenButton solution allows us to offer our customers additional performance capabilities as we look to expand our algorithm offerings across cloud architectures."

Price and Availability

The updated plugin for Geneious is supplied as a free add-on, with users paying a per core hour rate. Please visit http://www.greenbutton.com/Applications/Geneious.

About GreenButton Limited

The team at GreenButton help transition software vendors & their applications to the cloud. They ensure that both the vendor and their customers benefit from the cloud, by providing all the GreenButton components to sell, support and deliver a cloud solution with minimal risk and effort. They are also Microsoft's Global winner for Windows Azure, 2011 ISV partner of the year as well as finalist in both the 2011 Bizspark, and High Performance technical computing awards. They are based in Wellington New Zealand, with sales office in Seattle, Wash., and Palo Alto, Calif.

About Biomatters, Ltd.

Biomatters is a privately-held scientific software company, with offices in Newark, San Francisco and headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand. Biomatters creates software that can be used by researchers in their daily work, including the popular Geneious Pro and Geneious Server tools. Biomatters' technology converts raw data into meaningful, visual information, simplifying research, accelerating biological research and ultimately improving efficiency.

About Windows Azure

Windows Azure is the cloud-based development platform that lets you build and run applications in the cloud, launch them in minutes instead of months and code in multiple languages and technologies including .NET, Java, and PHP.

-----

Source: GreenButton