Dear all,
Strolling through the ISMB exhibitors hall in Vienna I got in
contact with the company SciEngines [1]. They are a
not-so-recent-anymore startup from a neighbouring University,
i.e. a bunch of electroengineers crafting themselves from
A to E and G to Z the FPGA-cards for application acceleration.
They only have a lower-case "b" for Bioinformatics, i.e. they are
doing what "everyone" is doing FPGA-wise like Smith-Waterman and
friends. Now, looking back at what happened with the introduction
of smartphones, i.e. a compass and 3D sensors plus geo location,
we want a Cambrian explosion in FPGA-accelerated applications
and maybe some total new breed of things that we had not even
thought about before - like BioCaching. And, prior to that, well,
let's just make sure that such technology solves our real
problems in protein folding, statistical genetics or
next-generation sequencing or ... you name it.
So, we want to see the technology brought to the masses and then
get back all the creativity of the community and applications that
are tailored for the FPGAs. The idea was, that Debian and (Debian
Med in particular for Bioinformatics) would be an excellent
platform to communicate between science and engineering.
After a friendly ping of mine and an even friendlier reply from
their CTO plus a visit two weeks ago, we came up with the
following experiment:
* SciEngines will officially support Debian (and Debian Med
with it) for all their hardware
* They will open up their API for application acceleration down to
the level that it is of general use also for other FPGA vendors,
such that
- respective collaboration makes sense for their competitors
- there are no obvious violations of the DFSG
- everyone can join FPGA development, also with no hardware
attached when using an emulator (external to SciEngines,
various possibilities)
* SciEngines prepares a tutorial for software people like us for
the employment of FPGA technology for application acceleration
* The tutorial will be tested (here it comes) with whoever would
want to come a day earlier for the Southport meeting. Attention,
this may change your life. FPGAs are very fashionable these
days in many industries, not only for us. SciEngines will be
with us for the whole weekend to start knowing you all better.
So, if interested in attending this event, scheduled to take the
whole of Friday, Janary 27th, then please indicate so on our
Sprint's wiki page [2] by setting your arrival date to the 26th.
Looking forward to seeing you in Southport
Steffen
[1] http://www.sciengines.com
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012
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