A partnership described at Mitrionics and Nallatech Team Up On Accelerator Kit describes a new FPGA platform. They have ported a portion of NCBI BLAST-N to run on it–and the source is provided through the Mitrion-C Open Bio Project. You can utilize their SDK with a C Variant (Mitrion-C) to port your own application without needing to directly program the FPGA hardware. They also have a “personal edition” that you can use to prototype applications without access to any FPGA hardware.
Do you have experience with this or other FPGA platforms that provide a similarly abstracted API?
A recent blog entry about The Neuroscience of Creativity lists some interesting questions, such as: what does the brain look like when it’s being creative? Or when it’s listening to music?
I looked around and found a few sites, such as the NeuroGrid site, that describes how brain activity data can be collected and then the analysis of that data distributed across a computing grid.
Perhaps the questions asked above about creativity will be answered using HPC?
I’ve enjoyed utilizing Information Technology to enable scientific research over the years. That research has ranged from Operations Research to High Energy Physics to Genomics. HPC has always been a key tool. However, to support large scale research projects, the whole gamut of enterprise IT concerns come into play. At this blog, I’ll record some of my experiences as I face these ever changing concerns. I hope that it will spark discussions and be helpful to others working hard to help enable scientific discoveries.
Gary Stiehr
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