An Energy-Efficient Pipelined-Multiprocessor Architecture for Biological Sequence Alignment

Biological sequence alignment procedure demands an accurate, high speed, and efficient system to align sequences due to exponential growth of genomic databases. Several software-based as well as hardware-based schemes have been developed to perform alignment operation. Unfortunately, these approaches do not meet the requirement of hardware resource and processing time of recent growth of biological sequences. This article presents a pipelined-multiprocessor architecture with an energy-efficient approach to meet the requirement of processing of alignment operation at hardware speed. This architecture introduces register-file concept, instead of conventional memory-based approach, to reduce run-time storage requirement as well as power consumption. In addition, the proposed alignment architecture does not incur any preprocessing operations present in most of the existing alignment approaches. Moreover, it does not need any sorting or comparison operation during the preparation of final sequence alignment. This architecture achieves 128 GCUPS performance and also acquires 107.20 GCUPS/W throughput with respect to power consumption. The proposed architecture brings down 97.29% power consumption compared to state of the art multiprocessor architectures. Experimentally, it has been observed that, this novel architecture exhibits reduction in energy consumption by ≈97.51% and achieves 2.56 GCUPS gain factor in an energy-efficient manner over all existing hardware approaches.