The purpose of the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project is to accelerate key bioinformatics applications by porting their performance critical parts to Mitrion-C and running these on the Mitrion Virtual Processor in FPGAs.

The first bioinformatics application that has been developed by the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project is a version of NCBI BLAST with an accelerated BLASTN program for nucleotide searches. Currently, the project is working on porting the BLASTP protein search algorithm to Mitrion-C.

The initial port of BLASTN has been done by Mitrionics with SGI contributing integration work for the SGI RASC RC100 platform.

The Mitrion Virtual Processor is a fine-grained, massively parallel, configurable soft-core processor that allows software to execute on FPGAs, without the software developer having to deal with the hardware desing tool complexities of working directly with the FPGA hardware.

All relevant project files are at SourceForge.

If you need to get started with accelerated BLAST searches right away, Mitrionics is providing turn-key packages based on the project.

Mitrion-C development is done using the Mitrion Software Development Kit. Register on the My Mitrion user forum to get a free version.