Exploration Study on Configurable Instruction Set for Bioinformatics' Applications

Abstract

In the past decade, the needs for faster data analysis with high throughput has increased dramatically. Especially in the domain of Bioinformatics and biological data analysis. A common way to overcome this issue is to develop an Application Specific Instruction Processor (ASIP) to accelerate the processing power demanding tasks of the algorithm. In this paper, the procedure to achieve this for Kalign, an algorithm from the field of Bioinformatics, is presented using Xtensa re-configurable processor. The results present a 30% increase of performance, by reducing instruction fetches and implementing common procedures with a new instruction. © 2019 IEEE.