[Seqan-dev] SeqAn 2.2 released

[Hannes Hauswedell <hannes.hauswedell@fu-berlin.de>]

Dear users and programmers, 

We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.2 of the SeqAn library and 
updated versions of the official SeqAn-based applications. New features 
include the preliminary addition of a bi-directional FM-Index and a new 
interface for performing multiple sequence alignments at the same time. The 
latter uses SIMD [1] features of modern processors to perform up to 16 
alignments in parallel *per cpu-core* (in addition to possible application 
level multi-threading). Important "under the hood" changes include the 
replacement of SeqAn's custom threading framework with C++11's thread library. 
This fixes some rare, but long-standing bugs in BAM I/O and improves 
performance slightly.

There are also major infrastructural changes, including support for the Intel 
Compiler on all platforms and also experimental support for Clang/C2 on 
Windows [2]. For the official applications many fixes and improvements to the 
build system have made all new and optimized binaries possible that work on 
even more platforms.

All publicly documented interfaces are preserved and no supported platforms 
where dropped. It is now our policy that this shall not happen in the 2.x 
cycle anymore at all so you can trust that your applications work with the 
next releases. Do note, however, that we dropped some interfaces and supported 
platforms between 2.0 and 2.1.

**Further links**
Full Changelog: https://github.com/seqan/seqan/blob/master/CHANGELOG.rst 
Downloads:      http://packages.seqan.de/
New Homepage:   https://www.seqan.de

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD
[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-with-microsoft-codegen-in-vs-2015-update-1/

Best regards,
-- 
Hannes Hauswedell

PhD candidate
Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics / Freie Universität Berlin

address     Institut für Informatik
            Takustraße 9
            Room 019
            14195 Berlin
telephone   +49 (0)30 838-75241
fax         +49 (0)30 838-75218
e-mail      hannes.hauswedell@[molgen.mpg.de|fu-berlin.de]