The Assemblathon project is intended to be an ongoing set of contests between developers of genome assembly software to determine how good different assemblers are at tackling different problems relating to this growing field. Results from the second competition (Assemblathon 2) have just been published in the journal Gigascience:
The paper, a result of a large international collaboration, was driven by the work of the two lead authors (Keith Bradnam and Joseph Fass) who work in the Bioinformatics Core.