The Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel
Mackay, Richards et al., Nature
North Carolina State University's Trudy Mackay and her colleagues present the Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel, "a community resource for analysis of population genomics and quantitative traits."
OpenCL + Python = CLyther
March 12, 2010
Python users interested in taking advantage of multicore or GPU hardware should keep an eye out for CLyther, a Python tool for OpenCL (Open Computing Language), the open source programming platform for heterogeneous processing, intended to make scripting OpenCL code as trivial as Python itself. Similar to Cython for C, the CLyther is still under development but is set for beta release sometime before April 14. CLyther's features will include features such as prototyping for OpenCL code, OpenCL kernel function creation using Python language definition, a Python emulation mode for OpenCL code, just to name a few. While OpenCL has not made as much noise as NVIDIA's CUDA, Douglas Eadline says that the future of the open source platform is no longer dubious as was once thought by many in the HPC community. The Khronos Group, an industry consortium geared towards creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing and graphics, and a long list of vendors, including NVIDIA, have elected to make OpenCL the industry standard, so the platform is probably here to stay. "From an Independent Software Developer standpoint, OpenCL is is the gateway to hybrid (CPU/GPU) computing," writes Eadline. "As anyone with scar tissue in the HPC industry can tell you, investing resources and time into non-standard Applications Programing Interfaces is a risky business. MPI was developed for similar reasons, (i.e. programmers did not want to recode every time a new parallel computer architecture hit the server room)."