Visiomed (ASX: VSG) is readying itself to commence marketing and distribution of its Funhaler device worldwide, although it is still awaiting US FDA clearance for the product.

Sun Microsystems has revealed its Fire Starter cluster for bioinformatics, a pre-configured hardware/software computing cluster aimed at small labs, clinical research organisations, departments within larger organisations, and other groups who have limited IT staffs and budgets.

They've been using it for years to check for physical faults in semiconductor manufacturing, but researchers at computer chip maker Intel are excited about the potential new uses for a spectroscopic technique they hope could revolutionise the testing of samples for contaminants and disease.

If computing power were water, Australia's drought would be rapidly coming to a close. Thanks to lowering costs and steadily improving technology, Australian life scientists and other researchers are rapidly gaining access to unprecedented amounts of computing power to support their work.

Intel has launched a research project aimed at applying the same technology the chip maker uses to detect flaws in microprocessors to the field of cancer detection.

According to John E Davies, general manager of e-business channels and marketing at Intel, the world offers computer companies four big targets when it comes to networked and clustered computers: energy; manufacturing, financial services -- and bioinformatics.

Intel, chip maker to millions of personal computers across the world, is looking hard at the next emerging market -- biotech devices.

Computer chip specialist Intel and the Alzheimer's Association are to fund a consortium aimed at using technology to ease the suffering of those afflicted by the disease to the tune of US$1 million.

Supercomputer maker SGI is trying to extend its lifespan in the high-performance computing (HPC) market with the launch of the Onyx4 UltraVision, an upgraded flagship system it hopes will appeal to life sciences and other researchers keen to get ever more detail in the graphical representation of their data.

Blue Gene -- IBM's highly touted petaFLOP protein-folding supercomputer -- is still at least three years away from scheduled completion in 2006, but project managers say they have achieved some significant milestones. But will gains in other high-performance computing areas, notably clustering, make the system obsolete by the time it's ready to be unveiled?

The Canadian effort to decode the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus is a veritable showcase of modern-day sequencing and life science computing technology.