http://www.sequencesqueeze.org/

Sorry this is a little late .. but better than never yeah?

The Pistoia Alliance Sequence Squeeze Competition

Amazon vouchers

The first 40 entries received will each receive a US$20 Amazon Web Services voucher.
(Only one voucher per person.)

The volume of next-generation sequencing data is a big problem. Data volumes are growing rapidly as sequencing technology improves. Individual runs are providing many more reads than before, and decreasing run times mean that more data can today be generated by a single machine in one day than a single machine could have produced in the whole of 2005.

Storing millions of reads and their quality scores uncompressed is impractical, yet current compression technologies are becoming inadequate. There is a need for a new and novel method of compressing sequence reads and their quality scores in a way that preserves 100% of the information whilst achieving much-improved linear (or, even better, non-linear) compression ratios.

The Pistoia Alliance, in the interests of promoting pre-competitive collaboration, is putting forward a prize fund of US$15,000 to the best novel open-source NGS compression algorithm submitted before the closing date of 15 March 2012.

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