A run-time reconfigurable system for gene-sequence searching

Abstract

Advances in the field of bio-technology has led to an ever increasing demand for computational resources to rapidly search large databases of genetic information. Databases with billions of data elements are routinely compared and searched for matching and near-matching patterns. We present a system developed to search DNA sequence data using run-time reconfiguration of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The system provides an order of magnitude increase in performance while reducing hardware complexity when compared to existing commercial systems.