Storage acceleration tech maker Fusion-io announced at the International Supercomputing Conference that its ioMemory technology is being utilized to accomplish performance improvements in MySQL database queries for research carried out by the Protein Data Bank (PDB.) PDB is a huge repository of three-dimensional structures of large molecules and nucleic acids, powered by research conducted at the University of California, San Diego in collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).

“Using Fusion’s server-deployed technologies, researchers were able to reduce the time required to conduct complex MySQL database queries that determine relationships between proteins and the effects proteins can have on each other. Using traditional hard drive disks, a query analyzing more than 200 million protein structures took 30 minutes,” said Allan Snavely, Associate Director of SDSC and co-Principal Investigator.

He also added that using Fusion-io’s server-deployed technologies that place the storage memory medium right next to the processor, the same query took a mere three minutes.

The machine used to carry out the research comes equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon E5530 2.40 GHz processors, 48 GB of DDR3-1066 memory and four 320 GB ioDrives mounted and configured as a single 1.2 TB RAID 0 device.

Fusion-io is expanding in more areas than one, and partnerships are a key element in this process. As a part of an agreement with Dell, the firm’s storage acceleration offerings have been furthered integrated into Dell’s server portfolio. This is meant to enable customers’ massive big data projects – something Helwett-Packard is also looking at developing products around. Eni S.p.A. of Italy and the University of Hamburg  now use 3PAR servers to accommodate more data-intensive research.

As this kind of research, as well as other operations that leverage big data, grow in scale, demand is following the curve. That’s where Fusion-io comes in – and it is also the reason behind a 7.5 percent surge the company’s stock saw only a few weeks after its IPO, validating flash storage for an industry as well as the investment sector.