Advances in high-throughput technologies (such as cost-affordable sequencing of whole genomes, population-scale variation screening, or mass spectrometry-based proteomics) are continually propelling related bioinformatics research into the era of big data. This establishes a strong need of sophisticated parallel algorithms and architectures for fast and efficient processing of large-scale biological datasets. To address these challenges, diverse accelerators have been used to accelerate important and computationally demanding applications in Bioinformatics. Typical accelerators include but not limited to FPGAs, GPUs, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, Intel SSE and AVX vector processing units, and custom hardware chips. Meanwhile, various parallel algorithms inherently enabling to use accelerators have been or are being developed as well.

This workshop focuses on accelerator-enabled parallel algorithms and applications in Bioinformatics, and will award a Best GPU-Paper/Talk Award to an outstanding full paper based on GPU computing or an outstanding invited talk . This award is generously sponsored by NVIDIA Corporation and the prize is one GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card ($1000 worth). We will consider original submissions that (1) use accelerator technologies to address important biological problems, or (2) propose new parallel algorithms and software tools elaborated to have the potential and feasibility to exploit accelerators. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Biological sequence databases
Biological sequence analysis
Computational genomics and proteomics
Infrastructure and systems tools for high-performance bioinformatics
Metagenomics
Next-generation sequencing
Phylogeny inference
Protein structure prediction and modeling
Workflow and systems for big biological data management
The WACEBI 2016 workshop will be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine 2016 (BIBM 2016), Shenzhen, China, Dec. 15-18, 2016. Please visit the workshop at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~yliu/wacebi2016.

Online Submission
Please submit your papers (up to 8 pages IEEE 2-column format) through the online submission system (https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2016/bibm16/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S09&undisplay_detail=1&wh=/cyberchair/2016/bibm16/scripts/ws_submit.php). You can download the format instruction from http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html). Electronic submissions (in PDF or Postscript format) are required. Accepted papers by this workshop will be published by the IEEE Computer Society. Additionally, we plan to publish selected papers (with technically significant expansion and revision) as a special issue in some highly respected journal. In addition, if you would like to give an invited talk in this workshop, please submit a one-page abstract paper (150 words at minimum) for consideration.

Important Dates
August 23, 2016: Paper submission open
October 17, 2016 (extended and hard deadline): Due date for full workshop papers submission
October 29, 2016: Due date for invited talk abstract (one page and minimum 150 words) submission
November 10, 2016: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
November 20, 2016: Camera-ready of accepted papers
December 15, 2016: Workshop

Program Chairs
Yongchao Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Bertil Schmidt (University of Mainz, Germany)

Program Committee Members
Sunita Chandrasekaran (University of Delaware, USA)
Yupeng Chen (Sichuan Normal University, China)
Scott Emrich (University of Notre Dame, USA)
Jorge Gonzalez-Dominguez (University of A Coruna, Spain)
Andreas Hildebrandt (University of Mainz, Germany)
Ananth Kalyanaraman (Washington State University, USA)
Ben Langmead (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Dominique Lavenier (INRIA/IRISA, France)
Tao Li (Nankai University, China)
Weiguo Liu (Shandong University, China)
Ruibang Luo (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Jan Schroeder (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia)
Sharma Thankachan (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Gang Wang (Nankai University, China)
Jaroslaw Zola (The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA)