Hyper customized processors for bio-sequence database scanning on FPGAs

Protein sequences with unknown functionality are often compared to a set of known sequences to detect functional similarities. Efficient dynamic-programming algorithms exist for solving this problem, however current solutions still require significant scan times. These scan time requirements are likely to become even more severe due to exponential database growth. In this paper we present a new approach to bio-sequence database scanning using re-configurable FPGA-based hardware platforms to gain high performance at low cost. Efficient mappings of the Smith-Waterman algorithm using fine-grained parallel processing elements (PEs) that are tailored towards the parameters of a query have been designed. We use customization opportunities available at run-time to dynamically hyper customize the systolic array to make better use of available resource. Our FPGA implementation achieves a speedup of approximately 170 for linear gap penalties and 125 for affine gap penalties as compared to a standard desktop computing platform. We show how hyper-customization at run-time can be used to further improve the performance.

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