Re: Southport + Seeding FPGA application acceleration in our community
----- Mail original -----
> De: "Steffen Möller" <steffen_moeller@gmx.de>
> À: "Debian Med Project List" <debian-med@lists.debian.org>
> Envoyé: Mercredi 26 Octobre 2011 14:45:50
> Objet: Southport + Seeding FPGA application acceleration in our community
> 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.
>
I work with people working on FPGA (and others...). FPGA is nice, but design is completely different, and quite hard. It's rather like electronics rather than informatics, designing with kinda VSDL.
However, this is a nice step for its integration in open source community.
> 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.
>
Sounds nice, however I won't be able to come sooner...
> 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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