The ability to generate massive amounts of sequencing data continues to overwhelm the processing capacity of existing algorithms and compute infrastructures. In this work, we explore the use of hardware/software co-design and hardware acceleration to significantly reduce the execution time of short sequence alignment, a crucial step in analyzing sequenced genomes.
We introduce Shouji, a highly parallel and accurate pre-alignment filter that remarkably reduces the need for computationally-costly dynamic programming algorithms. The first key idea of our proposed pre-alignment filter is to provide high filtering accuracy by correctly detecting all common subsequences shared between two given sequences. The second key idea is to design a hardware accelerator design that adopts modern FPGA (field-programmable gate array) architectures to further boost the performance of our algorithm.
