Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

ANR BioWiC (2009-2011)

Participants : Steven Derrien, Naeem Abbas, Patrice Quinton.

The increasing flow of genomic data provided by the steadily improvement of new biotechnologies cannot be now efficiently exploited without a systematic in silico analysis. Data need to be filtered, curated, classified, annotated, validated, etc., to be actively used in a discovery process. The design of such complex pipeline of processing stages is known to be an extremely tedious task as their designers have to deal with both specification and implementation issues. Indeed, the execution time of such workflows is very often a bottleneck as huge amount of data has to be processed. Therefore, the goal of the BioWiC (Bioinformatics Workflows for Intensive Computation) project is twofold:

• Reducing the design time of complex bioinformatics pipelines by providing a domain specific workflow environment;

• Reducing the execution time of these workflows through the use of parallel execution on GPU, FGPA and clusters of PC whenever possible.

The ANR BioWic project is funded for 3 years, and involves several institutions (INRA-MIG, Ouest Genopole, Cairn and Symbiose project-teams at INRIA) and Universities (Eliaus Laboratory at Université de Perpignan). For more details see http://biowic.inria.fr . CAIRN will provide a framework for helping semi-automatic generation of flexible IP cores, by widening the scope typical design constraints so as to integrate communication and data reuse optimizations between the host and the hardware accelerator.