Reconfigurable acceleration of genomic data analysis

Prof. Wayne Luk from Imperial College London visited our group in April, 2016

Abstract
This talk presents recent advances in accelerating the analysis of genomic data, making use of reconfigurable data flow engines based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Applications include speeding up bisulfite sequence alignment for prenatal and cancer diagnosis. The potential of this approach will be summarised.

Biography
Dr Wayne Luk is Professor of Computer Engineering at Imperial College London. He founded and leads the Computer Systems Section and the Custom Computing Group in Department of Computing, and was Visiting Professor at Stanford University and Queen's University Belfast. His research interests include reconfigurable computing, field-programmable technology, and design automation. He developed hardware compilation techniques based on syntax-directed translation, pipeline vectorization, and source-level transformation; he contributed to optimizations for run-time reconfiguration, custom instruction processors, and programmable embedded-block architecture for field-programmable devices. He received many awards at international conferences, including FPL (2004, 2007, 2008, 2010), ERSA (2004), FPT (2005, 2008), ASAP (2008), SAMOS (2008), and SPL (2008, 2009). He led a team winning two Platform Grants from UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and a Research Excellence Award from Imperial College.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the BCS. He received his MA, MSc and DPhil degrees from University of Oxford.