Accelerating Smith-Waterman Algorithm for Faster Sequence Alignment using Graphical Processing Unit

In bioinformatics, sequence alignment is very important task to compare and find similarity between biological sequences. Smith Waterman algorithm is most widely used for alignment process but it has quadratic time complexity. This algorithm is using sequential approach so if the no. of biological sequences is increasing then it takes too much time to align sequences. In this paper, parallel approach of Smith Waterman algorithm is proposed and implemented according to the architecture of graphic processing unit using CUDA in which features of GPU is combined with CPU in such a way that alignment process is three times faster than sequential implementation of Smith Waterman algorithm and helps in accelerating the performance of sequence alignment using GPU. This paper describes the parallel implementation of sequence alignment using GPU and this intra-task parallelization strategy reduces the execution time. The results show significant runtime savings on GPU.