Abstract

Advances in DNA-sequencing technology have far outpaced Moore’s law, imposing significant challenges on the computationally intensive secondary analysis in the sequencing pipeline. An accelerator for seed extension, a critical and computationally intensive step in genome sequencing, is proposed. The accelerator, implementing a string-independent automata, consists of a triangular array of 25×2 custom-designed processing elements. It performs 2.46 million reads per second (MRPS), achieving a 1581× improvement in power efficiency and 165.5× smaller silicon footprint compared to a system setting with dual-socket Xeon E5-2697 v3 server processors.