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arXiv · 1604.01789

GateKeeper: A New Hardware Architecture for Accelerating Pre-Alignment in DNA Short Read Mapping

Mohammed Alser·Hasan Hassan·Hongyi Xin·Oğuz Ergin·Onur Mutlu·Can Alkan
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Abstract

Motivation: High throughput DNA sequencing (HTS) technologies generate an excessive number of small DNA segments -- called short reads -- that cause significant computational burden. To analyze the entire genome, each of the billions of short reads must be mapped to a reference genome based on the similarity between a read and "candidate" locations in that reference genome. The similarity measurement, called alignment, formulated as an approximate string matching problem, is the computational bottleneck because: (1) it is implemented using quadratic-time dynamic programming algorithms, and (2) the majority of candidate locations in the reference genome do not align with a given read due to high dissimilarity. Calculating the alignment of such incorrect candidate locations consumes an overwhelming majority of a modern read mapper's execution time. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a fast and effective filter that can detect incorrect candidate locations and eliminate them before invoking computationally costly alignment operations. Results: We propose GateKeeper, a new hardware accelerator that functions as a pre-alignment step that quickly filters out most incorrect candidate locations. GateKeeper is the first design to accelerate pre-alignment using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which can perform pre-alignment much faster than software. GateKeeper can be integrated with any mapper that performs sequence alignment for verification. When implemented on a single FPGA chip, GateKeeper maintains high accuracy (on average >96%) while providing up to 90-fold and 130-fold speedup over the state-of-the-art software pre-alignment techniques, Adjacency Filter and Shifted Hamming Distance (SHD), respectively. The addition of GateKeeper as a pre-alignment step can reduce the verification time of the mrFAST mapper by a factor of 10. Availability: https://github.com/BilkentCompGen/GateKeeper

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Mohammed Alser, Hasan Hassan, Hongyi Xin, Oğuz Ergin, Onur Mutlu, Can Alkan. 2016-04-06. GateKeeper: A New Hardware Architecture for Accelerating Pre-Alignment in DNA Short Read Mapping. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics%2Fbtx342

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