About The Alliance

The application of advanced computing technology to any of the sciences is typically made available independently (by the manufacturers of the products), leaving the scientific community on their own to wrestle with the challenges of software integration, application porting, and custom configurations. True collaboration is often inhibited by conflicting priorities and goals.

As a result, the ecosystem of computational solutions available to the Bioinformatics scientific community is fragmented with hardware and software components that require a great amount of work – and experience – in order to be efficiently integrated, managed and ultimately put into production – creating an end-user environment laced with frustration, additional expense, and inefficiencies.

Today, the maturity of GPU and FPGA technology has inspired a growing confidence in alternative HPC processing solutions, and presents new possibilities for breakthrough performance at price points that are attractive for even the smaller research firms. But with a relatively immature ecosystem, industry adoption will require coordinated, collaborative efforts moving forward. The challenge of defining and delivering custom, cost-effective, fully integrated, and simplistic alternative processing solutions is too large for any one company to take on.

The formation of the Prometheus Alliance is a natural evolution that will advance scientific discovery by taking a true, collaborative approach, guided by the voice of the community, to developing solutions that are desperately needed by the Bioinformatics research community.