The large volumes of data generated by modern sequencing technologies present significant challenges in their manipulation and analysis. In addition, the continuous technological advances are lowering sequencing costs, thus allowing larger data sets to be collected and new types of applications to be envisioned. The bioinformatics community is adopting novel computing technologies to cope with the challenges set forth by complex data integration, management, storage and processing tasks.

This hackathon will give the chance to experts in the field to work together, exchange ideas and implement or test prototype solutions to problems of mutual interest. The outcome of this event will be a report describing the results produced by any research, experimental, or design work held at the event, and a reference to any source code that was produced, which must be released to the public.

The hackathon is centered on problems in the high-throughput sequencing domain. Within this realm, the topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• cloud computing
• data/sample tracking; recording operations performed on data
• dataset and storage management
• distributed bioinformatics applications
• distributed cloud databases
• distributed data processing frameworks, such as Hadoop
• high-level distributed programming (e.g., Pig, Hive)
• process automation
• workflow management; high-level programming

The event is aimed at bioinformaticians and software developers who are using or planning to use Hadoop or similar cloud computing frameworks.