An FPGA aligner for short read mapping

The rapid growth of short read datasets poses a new challenge to the mapping of short reads to a reference genome in terms of sensitivity and execution speed. In this work, we present a parallel architecture for short read mapping utilizing field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware. The computation intensive semi-global alignment and the hash table lookup operations are mapped onto an FPGA. The proposed Align Core is implemented with a parallel block structure to gain computational efficiency. We present a new parallel block-wise alignment structure to approximate the conventional dynamic programming algorithm. The performance of our FPGA aligner is compared to the GASSST and BWA …