“Unipro” Information Technology Center from Novosibirsk has been successfully developing software for various technological areas for 16 years. Among their customers are Sun Mycrosystems, Google, Intel. One of the company’s latest projects is a freeware bioinformational system UGENE, included already in two Linux distributives. The system architecture enables adaptation for various applied areas. Parallel realization of the embedded computer algorithms provides excellent efficiency characteristics.

The company was interested in searching partners in order to extend the UGENE system application area. For this purpose, “Unipro” addressed Technopark “Novosibirsk” and placed their technological offer “Adaptation of customer bioinformatics algorithms into visual high-performance computing environment for analysis of biomolecular data” in the databases of RTTN-Gate2RuBIN and the Enterprise Europe Network (Ref. 09 RU 86FG 3CUG). In several weeks, Enterprise Europe Network — Saarbrücken expressed an interest on behalf of their client mineway GmbH, a daughter company of German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken. Mineway offered to use UGENE in another science-intensive applied area — business analysis of large economic data arrays — by embedding the German intelligent algorithms into UGENE architecture.

The German party also suggested using Graphics Processing Units (GPU) for boosting the business analysis efficiency. The Russian company found it very interesting, since “Unipro” programmers have already started working with GPU. The two companies soon achieved agreement on the areas of technological responsibility in the new project.

The parties agreed also to submit an application to the joint Russian-German call for technological projects (April 2009) to receive co-financing for developing a new code system GMOS (GPU-based in-Memory OLAP System). The partners signed a technical cooperation agreement and prepared a joint application. However, the application didn’t win the grant. Nevertheless, “Unipro” and Mineway GmbH decided to start the project implementation at their own expenses; they also plan to submit joint applications to other appropriate calls.

Ivan Golosov, the “Unipro” Director, says:

“This project is actually unique. It involves two most perspective IT trends: the state-of-the-art methods for analysis and pre-evaluation of information, on the one hand, and effective realization and optimization of algorithms for modern parallel computer systems, on the other hand. Tasks like these are our company specialization, therefore we are extremely interested in this project. The global economic crisis entailed new problems for all of market actors, forcing them to take verified and adequate strategic decisions. They should act quickly, processing efficiently large data arrays to extract a maximum of analytical and hidden data”.