MIMOS LAUNCHES eBIOCHEM PORTAL

Gateway for bioinformatics and chemistry researchers worldwide to share knowledge and expertise

KUALA LUMPUR, 15 MAY 2008 ­– MIMOS today launched its eBioChem Portal - a gateway for bioinformatics and chemistry researchers worldwide to share knowledge and expertise - which was officiated by Minister of Science, Technology & Innovation, Datuk Dr Maximus Ongkili at the Grid Computing Conference (GCC) held in conjunction with the 16th World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT) 2008.

A project under KnowledgeGRID Malaysia, the National Grid Computing Initiative, MIMOS’ eBioChem Portal was developed, in collaboration with Altair Engineering, to provide a user-friendly, secure, reliable, fast and cost-effective access to computational and data capabilities specifically for bioinformatics, chemistry and life sciences industries.

“KnowledgeGRID Malaysia is far more than just resource sharing. It is a significant step forward to build the cyber-infrastructure for Malaysia to provide a coordinated, single economic engine to compete with the rest of the world. Above all, it is a commitment, through the advancement of frontier technologies, to improve the quality of life for every citizen in Malaysia,” said Dato’ Abdul Wahab Abdullah, President & CEO, MIMOS.

“Extending the concept of grid from computing grid to knowledge grid, it is possible to make use of a grid as not only sharable computing resources, but also as time and place in which people work together, create knowledge, and share knowledge and experiences in a community,” he added.

The bioinformatics research area is now faced with a mountain of ever-increasing and distributed information. The molecular and genomic data required to represent the picture of the whole genomic system are dispersed across the world in different sources of data, while at the same time each data source resides in its own format.

The eBioChem Portal is a technology platform that provides web-services such as job submission, job monitoring and job reports for bioinformatics and chemistry researchers and industries that require high computing power and short job processing time such as molecular and biological sequence information.

The molecular and biological sequence information applications currently available via the portal include amino-acid sequences of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences and computational chemistry.Grids allow the scientific community to interact in real time with modeled phenomena to steer through distributed simulations; and to successfully negotiate access to distributed yet highly expensive scientific instruments.

Grids have a huge impact on the life sciences and not just in drug discovery and bioinformatics. For example, the eBioChem portal gives life science organisations the agility necessary to streamline and replicate processes so repetitive tasks of scheduling multi-step processing are automated; make faster and smarter decisions through a step-by-step job submission guide and online job status monitoring anytime and from anywhere resulting in increased profitability, service, reliability and competitive advantage.