FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Partnership with Innovative Genomic Services Company

Corvallis, Oregon (May 13, 2009) – CenterSpace Software, a leading provider of enterprise class numerical component libraries for the .NET platform, and Floragenex, an innovative genomic research services company, today announced that they have teamed up to build a flexible genomics data analysis pipeline in the cloud.

Rapid growth of the research services business at Floragenex requires expansion of computing resources beyond the company’s current infrastructure. CenterSpace has deep knowledge of high-powered analytical software and experience developing applications utilizing the cloud computing power of Amazon Web Services. Together, the two companies are working to build a cloud-computing infrastructure to improve ease of use, lower costs, and accelerate data throughput for Floragenex.

“The new system retrieves genetic sequence data from the sequencing facility of choice, places it into storage in the cloud and runs analysis based on the particular needs of the project. The Floragenex end user can login to a web page to select their data, choose their parameters and run their analysis. The work is done on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computers and results are archived on Amazon S3 for easy retrieval. The costs are small and the benefits large,” says Trevor Misfeldt, CEO of CenterSpace Software.

“The massive volume of data that genome sequencers produce has required us to look for creative ways to scale our business. Working with CenterSpace allows us to lay the foundation for continued growth without making capital investments in IT hardware,” says Nathan Lillegard, CEO of Floragenex. “The bioinformatics work we do for our customers is particularly well suited to cloud computing, with large sets of data requiring intensive but discreet data processing. Building a cloud infrastructure now will allow us to grow our business and expand our service offerings more responsively.”

About the Companies

CenterSpace Software is a leading provider of enterprise class numerical component libraries for the .NET platform. Developers worldwide use CenterSpace products to develop .NET financial, engineering, and scientific applications. CenterSpace Software has offices in Corvallis, OR, and can be found on the Internet at www.centerspace.net.


Floragenex is a research services company focused on genomic technology applications in plant sciences. Floragenex enables scientists to do more, expanding their capability using a suite of advanced genomic services matched to the specific resources and goals of each project. Floragenex is based in Eugene, OR, and can be found on the internet at www.floragenex.com.

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Forward Scaling for Multicore Performance

The era of sequential, single-threaded software development deployed to a uniprocessor machine is rapidly fading into history. Nearly all computers sold today have at least two, if not four cores – and will have eight in the near future. Intel announced last month the successful production and testing of a new 48-core research processor which will be made available to industry and academia for research and development of manycore parallel software developer tools and languages.

Intel's recently announced 48-core processor

In the near future users of high performance software in finance, bio-informatics, or GIS will expect their applications to scale with core count, and software that fails to do so will either need to be rewritten or abandoned. To future-proof performance-sensitive software, code written today needs to be multicore aware, and scale automatically to all available cores – this is the key idea behind forward scaling software. If Moore’s ‘law’ is to be sustained into the future, hardware scalability must be joined with a similar shift in software. This fundamental shift in computing and application development, termed the ‘Manycore Shift’ by Microsoft, is an evolutionary shift that software developers must appreciate and adapt to in order to create long-living scalable applications.

CenterSpace’s Forward Scaling Strategy

This project of creating forward scaling software can sound daunting, but for many application developers it can be reduced to choosing the right languages & libraries for the computationally demanding portions of their application. If an application’s performance-sensitive components are forward scaling, so goes the application. At CenterSpace we are very performance sensitive and are working to insure that our users benefit from forward scaling behavior. Linear scaling with core number cannot always be achieved, but in the numerical computational domain we can frequently come close to this ideal.

Here are some parallel computing technologies that we are looking at adopting to ensure we meet this goal.
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