GRIDtoday names RENCI’s Bioportal top life sciences grid implementation

Published: September 12, 2006

CHAPEL HILL, NC, September 12, 2006 — The North Carolina/TeraGrid Bioportal, developed by the Renaissance Computing Institute, was recognized by the readers of GRIDtoday in the publication’s inaugural Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards.

The awards were announced today at the GridWorld conference in Washington, D.C. RENCI received the following honor from GRIDtoday publisher Tom Tabor:

• Reader’s Choice Award: Research organization demonstrating the Most Innovative Grid Implementation in life sciences

“We appreciate the recognition from GRIDtoday,” said RENCI Director Dan Reed. “The RENCI Bioportal team has worked hard to develop a tool that makes conducting research on a grid more intuitive and more productive. The exciting thing is that the Bioportal is continuing to evolve and improve with the addition of workflows and new capabilities.”

The Bioportal (www.ncbioportal.org or www.tgbioportal.org ) is a shared, extensible portal environment that brings together more than 140 computational tools and applications and many standard biological data sets. RENCI began developing the portal as the North Carolina Bioportal in 2004 with seed funding from the University of North Carolina’s Office of the President. Funding from the TeraGrid Science Gateways program allowed RENCI to deploy the TeraGrid Bioportal, which allows TeraGrid researchers to use the portal and gives Bioportal users access to the high-performance computing resources of the TeraGrid. RENCI also receives support from the National Institutes of Health for work integrating evolutionary biology and biomedical tools into the Bioportal.

The GRIDtoday Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards were determined by a survey of thousands of GRIDtoday readers, and will be a permanent annual feature of the publication.  GRIDtoday has two categories of awards: (1) Readers’ Choice, where winners have been determined by a random poll of GRIDtoday readers, and (2) Editors’ Choice, where winners have been determined by votes of an advisory group of recognized luminaries, contributors and editors influential in Grid and Service-Oriented IT.

Grids are used in a wide range of research and development efforts, including automotive and aerospace, bioinformatics, humanities research, security and defense, financial services, government, manufacturing, oil and gas, and pharmaceuticals.

“We are very excited about this opportunity to articulate the views and opinions of our readers to recognize the accomplishments that are being made in advancing the development and adoption of Grid, Service-Oriented IT and virtualization,” said Tabor.  “These industry recognition awards send a strong message to the recipients that the many global contributors working in or watching this important computing segment recognize their work, and consider their efforts meritorious. Our congratulations go out to all the winners.”