Hardware Acceleration of Short Read Mapping

Bioinformatics is an emerging field with seemingly limitless possibilities for advances in numerous areas of research and applications. We propose a scalable FPGA-based solution to the short read mapping problem in DNA sequencing, which greatly accelerates the task of aligning short length reads to a known reference genome. We compare the runtime, power consumption, and sensitivity of the hardware system to the BFAST and Bowtie software tools. The hardware system demonstrates a 250X speedup versus BFAST and a 31X speedup versus Bowtie on eight CPU cores. Also, the hardware system is more sensitive than Bowtie, which aligns approximately 80% of the short reads, as compared to 91% aligned by the hardware.