SUMMARY: : Similarity searches of amino acid sequences against the public metagenomic data can provide users insights about the function of sequences based on the environmental distribution of similar sequences. However, a considerable reduction in the amount of data or the accuracy of the result was necessary to conduct sequence similarity searches against public metagenomic data, because of the vast data size more than Terabytes. Here, we present an ultra-fast service for the highly accurate amino acid sequence similarity search, called PZLAST, which can search the user's amino acid sequences to several Terabytes of public metagenomic sequences in ∼10-20 min. PZLAST accomplishes its search speed by using PEZY-SC2, which is a Multiple Instruction Multiple Data many-core processor. Results of PZLAST are summarized by the ontology-based environmental distribution of similar sequences. PZLAST can be used to predict the function of sequences and mine for homologs of functionally important gene sequences. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PZLAST is freely accessible at https://pzlast.riken.jp/meta without requiring registration. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

IPTV (Internet protocol television) terminals have a large receiving buffer for IP networks with large delay jitter. However the large buffer for jitter would cause large delay in playout. In this paper, we propose novel methods to achieve low-delay playout for IPTV terminals even in large-jitter networks. To minimize buffering time of received data in an IPTV terminal, the buffering time should be the same amount as the maximum jitter only when the lowest delayed data is received. Under above condition, we determine the time of starting playout by utilizing only the lowest delayed data. Also, in order to keep low-delay playout, we control playout clock using the maximum occupancy of the receive buffer. Compared with other solutions proposed earlier to address network delay jitter, our proposal is focused particularly on providing features including low delay playout, applicability to large delay jitter, adjustment of processing workload (low processing cost), safe control without buffer underflow, and resilience against discontinuous packet loss.

In this paper, we describe a new coding scheme for super high definition (SHD) images using vector quantization of wavelet coefficients. This coding scheme includes hierarchical blocking and adaptive coding techniques to optimize the coding efficiency. The SHD image is decomposed into multi-resolution layers with the biorthogonal wavelet filter. The general ideas of the adaptive coding are to remove the redundancy of correlation between different layers and to attempt the minimization of perceptional error through adaptive bit allocation. To achieve the high compression ratio, wavelet coefficients except for the low frequency bands are coded by using vector quantization. The binary tree codebooks are created for each resolution layer. The depth of the tree search is also adaptively controlled according to the magnitude of the input vector. To evaluate the picture quality, objective and subjective tests are performed on the reconstructed SHD images. The results of our method give better SNR and picture quality compared with the JPEG baseline coding.