Performance versus Power Analysis for Bioinformatics Sequence Alignment

Abstract

Due to the utilization of abundant hardware resources, power consumption is becoming an important constraint forbioinformatics sequence alignment applications. In this paper, the dynamic power consumption for such applicationsand its impact on performance is evaluated. Additionally, resource utilization and performance results are provided forimplementation with a number of different FPGA platforms. The results obtained using Xilinx ISE tools and Matlabdemonstrate that the performance per unit Watt increases rapidly when increasing the number of ProcessingElements (PEs). Increasing the number of PEs beyond a certain number slows down the performance per unit Wattsignificantly. This behavior is used for approximating the number of PEs that gives an optimized performance per unitWatt.