Imagine Cup 2014 via Dot NET Bio

For those of you with an interest in DNA, genes and the meaning of life, we have an excellent platform you can use in the 2014 Imagine Cup. .NET Bio is an open source library of common bioinformatics functions built using C# and .NET 4.5. You get the power, ease of use and familiarity of .NET plus full Visual Studio support and examples. There is a user guide, training materials, and several sample applications for you to check out.

The project is located on Codeplex here. You can download the source and enlist in the project using Visual Studio, and start coding right away. You can start with your own idea, build onto existing programs or query the community about what they would like to see added and if you need assistance there is a user forum for questions. One of the sample applications is an extension for Microsoft Excel that allows scientists to analyze DNA sequences inside a spreadsheet.

There are also several related projects to .NET Bio that either work with or are built using .NET Bio. Try out the Bio Workflow Engine, DNA Sequence Annotation Studio, or FAST-LMM, to name a few.

There is work being done with high performance computing clusters – here is a quick glimpse of some code that is part of the project:

 

 namespace Bio.Hpc
{
    /// 
    /// Holds the status of cluster includes core info
    /// 
    public class ClusterStatus
    {
        #region private members
        private IScheduler _scheduler;
        #endregion

        #region properties
        /// 
        /// Gets or sets the cluster name
        /// 
        public string Cluster { get; set; }
        /// 
        /// Gets or sets the number of idle cores
        /// 
        public int IdleCores { get; set; }
        /// 
        /// Gets or sets the number of busy cores
        /// 
        public int BusyCores { get; set; }
        /// 
        /// Gets or sets the number of queued tasks
        /// 
        public int QueuedTasks { get; set; }
        #endregion properties

 

The coordinators and contributors of the project have varied interests and come from all over the world. You will find Australians, Americans, Europeans, South Americans all working together or separately on their own area of interest – come and join them!