The 7th FIRE (FPGA Innovation Research Exchange) event

📍Where: The event will be hosted at Wageningen University and Research
Building nr. 122 (Zodiac (A0107))
De Elst 1
6708 WD Wageningen

🗓️When: April 24, 2026, 9:30 - 18:00

We would like to invite you to the next FIRE (FPGA Innovation Research Exchange) event that will take place at Wageningen University on April 24, 2026 and will focus on “Computational Challenges and High-Performance Technologies for Life Sciences”. The event will showcase talks from industrial and academic partners such as KeyGene, Wageningen University, SURF and various technical universities in the Netherlands. The program details are listed below.

This is the 7th seminar in the FIRE series, sponsored by 4TU.NIRICT and co-organized by the Hardware Acceleration Network NL and Wageningen University. The FIRE symposia aim to bring together FPGA/GPU practitioners, computer science and engineering experts, scientific computing experts, application owners and HPC providers, to exchange ideas and discuss solutions.

Event program details

• 09.30 - 09.45 Welcome & coffee
• 09.45 - 10.00 Introduction
• 10.00 - 11.00 Keynote: Maureen van Eijnatten (KeyGene), Algorithms and platforms for plant genomics
• 10:00 - 12:30 1st thematic session: Life sciences compute challenges and solutions
  Jan Erik Doornweerd (WUR), High-throughput phenotyping in livestock barns – Dairy cows
  Wijbrand Ouweltjes (WUR), Monitoring broiler behavior using surveillance camera’s
  Nikos Alachiotis (UTwente), Genomic scans for selective sweeps using deep learning and FPGA acceleration
• 12.30 - 13.30 Lunch
• 13.30 - 15.00 Lightning talks
  *Jeremie Vandenplas (WUR), Genomic prediction on GPUs: a micro-benchmark
  *Elias Primetis (RadboudU), Computational limitations in HiC phasing and scaffolding approaches in haplotype-resolved genome assembly
  *Mohsen Safari (SURF), The Dutch high-performance compute infrastructure
  *Christiaan Baaij (QBayLogic), Clash HDL acceleration of compute intensive algorithms
• 15.00 - 15.30 Coffee break
• 15:30 - 17:00 2nd thematic session: Life sciences high-performance technologies
  *Kumar Saurabh Singh (UMaastricht), Computational challenges of multi-omics data for pathway discovery: lessons from MEANtools
  *Gina Alexopoulou (NTU Athens & SURF), High-throughput linkage disequilibrium computation on FPGAs: A streaming dataflow architecture for population genomics
• 17:00 - 18.00 Borrel and networking

Sign up: Please sign up for the event through the registration page here.
https://forms.gle/SyHApPM3kSEEELVE9

More information about our previous events can be found here.
https://www.4tu.nl/nirict/Documents/the-fire-symposia-series-fpga-innovation-research-exchange.pdf