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Brendan Lawlor, parallel computing specialist with NSilico delivered his talk on novel functional programming coupled with low level instruction based parallelism to an audience at PRACE DAYS 2015.This parallel technology helps drive bioinformatics processing in Simplicity™ our user friendly bioinformatics platform. The PRACE DAYS conference brought together experts from academia and industry who presented their advancements in HPC-supported science and engineering.
The programme included:

• Invited keynotes
• Scientific presentations in plenary & parallel sessions
• The User Forum (UF) meeting PRACEdays15
• Brendan’s talk was extremely well received, with commendation from the organisers.

The deCODE genetics team performed the research by combining DNA data of 10,000 people and combing it with family trees. They say that they could now find every woman at high-risk of breast cancer "at the touch of a button" and it would be "criminal" not to use the information.The study, published in the Nature Genetics, used the data to make a suite of discoveries including the age of the last common ancestor of men

ResearchKit is Apples newest innovation, a platform designed to help medical research, and not one that requires any extra hardware, or hard-to-understand software. It'll use iPhones, iPhone apps and a similar cloud data network we all use today. it will be used to collect and collate reams of data. This data might be inputted manually or automatically, depending on the app used. And where relevant, the data can be collated and used in wider research "We're incredibly confident that ResearchKit is going to transform medical research," said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

As sequencing technology develops scientists are constantly devising new and interesting ways for it to improve our lives. In 2010 geneticist Eric Schadt had one idea that could revolutionise how we track disease outbreaks - Use DNA sequencing to examine raw sewage. The basic idea is simple, use some form of DNA sensor to detect pathogens in sewage and then track back the outbreaks to a specific town, or even street! We’re still a ways off actually implementing something like this, but given the pace that sequencing technology is developing it could be a lot closer than we think. Christopher Mason, a Weill Cornell Medical College professor, has already implemented a simpler version of the idea, applying swabs to surfaces all over New York City to create a “Pathomap” of germs that has already been published in cell.

A post on the MassGenomics blog describes the challenges facing NGS such as the huge amounts of data generated, the storage required, privacy concerns and translation of NGS to the clinic.