Monday, April 24, 2006

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Seattle Times Microsoft taking a measured approach

"Microsoft this month launched a cross-industry group to address data-management problems posed by personalized medicine and other computational biology tasks. The BioIT Alliance is an effort to establish the company's products at the foundation of a field that could see explosive growth in the next decade.

Today, however, the place where biology and computing intersect — alternately called computational biology, bioinformatics or digital bio — is inhabited by a small group of specialized scientists.

Don Rule, a Microsoft platform-strategy adviser organizing the BioIT effort, estimated 50,000 work in bioinformatics. It's the kind of niche Microsoft might be expected to ignore, but Rule said the company sees big potential."

redux [04.04.06]
eWeek Microsoft Tackles Bioinformatics

"Microsoft on April 4 announced the formation of the BioIT Alliance, a cross-industry group created to enhance the ability to use and share biomedical data, at the Life Sciences Conference and Expo in Boston.

The working group will take on a series of "proof-of-concept" projects to understand how Microsoft's platforms can enhance the integration of the life sciences and IT."

redux [02.16.06]
PressZoom Microsoft funds a new high-performance computing institute for computational biology at Cornell

"Microsoft is funding a Microsoft Institute for High-Performance Computing at Cornell with annual funding of $400,000, renewable each year for an indefinite period. The new institute will greatly expand the ability of researchers to work with huge databases of DNA sequences and protein composition and shapes, and explore new software and applications for the analysis of biological information."

"Ron Elber, professor of computer science and director of CBSU, also will be director of the new institute, and it will be managed by CTC senior research associate Jaroslaw Pillardy, who manages CBSU. "The support of Microsoft is very much appreciated," Elber said. "They have supported us before, but this increased support makes it possible for the CBSU to expand and to do more interesting things and larger things based on new software technology from Microsoft.""

redux [10.29.05]
Sys-Con Applicability of the .NET Platform to Bioinformatics Research

"In all, bioinformatics is a field of research that has undergone a rapid explosion in terms of the numbers of tools and techniques that it has produced. While much of this progress can be attributed to the adaptability and flexibility of open source technologies such as Linux and Perl, it is important for bioinformatics professionals to consider that disseminating their bioinformatics tools to users can be as critical to scientific progress as developing new tools. A key way to facilitate the widespread dissemination of bioinformatics applications to biologists will likely be the development of an open sourced .NET class library to serve as framework for Windows-based bioinformatics applications."

redux [05.27.04]
Newsfactor Microsoft Moves Toward Supercomputing

"The Cornell Theory Center currently operates a cluster consisting of more than 900 processors based on Intel chips housed in Dell computers operating on Microsoft's Windows software. It represents the first steps in the development of Windows for a wide range of supercomputing applications.

Microsoft Research says its workshop brings together about 75 scientists to discuss data-intensive scientific computing as it pertains to Windows and .NET . The participants represent such fields as astronomy, material sciences, physics, archeology, oceanography, and bio-informatics and computational biology."