Hacker News Reader

Is genomic code typically distributed-memory parallel? I'm under the impression that it is more like batch processing, not a ton of node-to-node communication but you want lots of bandwidth and storage.

If you are doing a big distributed-memory numerical simulation, on the other hand, you probably want infiniband I guess.

AWS seems like an OK fit for the former, maybe not great for the latter...

View on HN

The fastest way to do a lot of genomics stuff is with FPGA accelerators, which also aren't used by most of the other tenants in a multi-tenant scientific computing center. The cloud is perfect for that kind of work.

That's interesting. It is sort of funny that I was right (putting genomics in the "maybe good for cloud" bucket) for the wrong reason (characterizing it as more suited for general-purpose commodity resources, rather than suited for the more niche FPGA platform).

This is a bit overstated. Yes, FPGA accelerators can be used effectively in some common genomics workflows. However, my experience is that the right software running on regular Intel/AMD/ARM processors is very competitive with FPGA-using solutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com