Implementation of a custom hardware-accelerator for short-read mapping using Burrows-Wheeler alignment

The mapping of millions of short DNA fragments to a large genome is a great challenge in modern computational biology. Usually, it takes many hours or days to map a large genome using software. However, the recent progress of programmable hardware such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provides a cost effective solution to this challenge. FPGAs contain millions of programmable logic gates to design massively parallel accelerators. This paper proposes a hardware architecture to accelerate the short-read mapping using Burrows-Wheeler alignment. The speed-up of the proposed architecture is estimated to be at least 10 times compared to its equivalent software application.