Reconfigurable Computing Platforms for Bioinformatics Applications

Abstract

As a result of the incredible rate of advancement in bioinformatics, many of 
our computational demands have grown to previously unimagined sizes and 
new methods to allow for the generation of appropriate solutions to process 
large amounts of biological data in an efficient manner are needed. Driven 
by the demands of high performance, flexible and reconfigurable computing 
platforms have emerged as a promising avenue to address these problems. 
In this article, we first design and implement reconfigurable computing sys
tems for bioinformatics applications to provide first hand experience of their 
architecture, benefits and real world implementations. In the bioinformat
ics community, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based reconfigurable 
computing platforms have achieved great popularity. With this flexibility, de
velopers can choose to achieve high performance through customized hard
ware or the relative freedom of software based solutions.