Among timing analysis applications, timing-driven operations are imperative for the success of optimization flows, such as placement, routing, logic synthesis, and physical synthesis. Optimization transforms change the design, and therefore have the potential to significantly affect timing information. As such, timing must be kept current to ensure slack integrity and timing closure. For reasonable turnaround and performance, the timer should incrementally update the affected portion of the design. The aim of the TAU 2015 timing contest is to seek novel ideas for incremental timing analysis by: (i) introducing the concept and motivating the importance of incremental timing analysis, (ii) encourage novel parallelization techniques (including multi-threading), and (iii) facilitating the creation of an incremental timing analysis framework with benchmarks to further advance this research area.

MOTIVATION: During the next phase of the Human Genome Project, research will focus on functional studies of attributing functions to genes, their regulatory elements, and other DNA sequences. To facilitate the use of genomic information in such studies, a new modeling perspective is needed to examine and study genome sequences in the context of many kinds of biological information. Pathways are the logical format for modeling and presenting such information in a manner that is familiar to biological researchers. RESULTS: In this paper we present an integrated system, called Pathways Database System, with a set of software tools for modeling, storing, analyzing, visualizing, and querying biological pathways data at different levels of genetic, molecular, biochemical and organismal detail. The novel features of the system include: (a) genomic information integrated with other biological data and presented from a pathway, rather than from the DNA sequence, perspective; (b) design for biologists who are possibly unfamiliar with genomics, but whose research is essential for annotating gene and genome sequences with biological functions; (c) database design, implementation and graphical tools which enable users to visualize pathways data in multiple abstraction levels, and to pose predetermined queries; and (d) an implementation that allows for web(XML)-based dissemination of query outputs (i.e. pathways data) to researchers in the community, giving them control on the use of pathways data. AVAILABILITY: Available on request from the authors.