0000000000230286

AUTHOR

Douglas L. Maskell

Accelerating short read mapping on an FPGA (abstract only)

The explosive growth of short read datasets produced by high throughput DNA sequencing technologies poses a challenge to the mapping of short reads to a reference genome in terms of sensitivity and execution speed. Existing methods often use a restrictive error model for computing the alignments to improve speed, whereas more flexible error models are generally too slow for large-scale applications. Although a number of short read mapping software tools have been proposed, designs based on hardware are relatively rare. In this paper, we present a hybrid system for short read mapping utilizing both software and field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware. The compute intensive semi-g…

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Reconfigurable Accelerator for the Word-Matching Stage of BLASTN

BLAST is one of the most popular sequence analysis tools used by molecular biologists. It is designed to efficiently find similar regions between two sequences that have biological significance. However, because the size of genomic databases is growing rapidly, the computation time of BLAST, when performing a complete genomic database search, is continuously increasing. Thus, there is a clear need to accelerate this process. In this paper, we present a new approach for genomic sequence database scanning utilizing reconfigurable field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware. In order to derive an efficient structure for BLASTN, we propose a reconfigurable architecture to accelerate the…

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Parallelized short read assembly of large genomes using de Bruijn graphs

Abstract Background Next-generation sequencing technologies have given rise to the explosive increase in DNA sequencing throughput, and have promoted the recent development of de novo short read assemblers. However, existing assemblers require high execution times and a large amount of compute resources to assemble large genomes from quantities of short reads. Results We present PASHA, a parallelized short read assembler using de Bruijn graphs, which takes advantage of hybrid computing architectures consisting of both shared-memory multi-core CPUs and distributed-memory compute clusters to gain efficiency and scalability. Evaluation using three small-scale real paired-end datasets shows tha…

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A hybrid short read mapping accelerator

Background The rapid growth of short read datasets poses a new challenge to the short read mapping problem in terms of sensitivity and execution speed. Existing methods often use a restrictive error model for computing the alignments to improve speed, whereas more flexible error models are generally too slow for large-scale applications. A number of short read mapping software tools have been proposed. However, designs based on hardware are relatively rare. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been successfully used in a number of specific application areas, such as the DSP and communications domains due to their outstanding parallel data processing capabilities, making them a compet…

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