FPGA-based HPRC for bioinformatics applications

Bioinformatics is one of the most frequently applied fields in FPGAs. Some applications in this field can be efficiently implemented by systolic arrays, which are intrinsically suited to FPGA implementations. Others can be expressed as numerical computations which can parallelize through pipelining, instruction-level and data-level parallelism. This chapter covers two sample applications encountered in bioinformatics, namely homology searches and biochemical molecular simulations, and shows how FPGAs can be effectively harnessed to achieve higher performances compared to off-the-shelf microprocessor technologies.