Smith-Waterman algorithm on heterogeneous systems: A case study

The well-known Smith-Waterman (SW) algorithm is a high-sensitivity method for local alignments. However, SW is expensive in terms of both execution time and memory usage, which makes it impractical in many applications. Some heuristics are possible but at the expense of losing sensitivity. Fortunately, previous research have shown that new computing platforms such as GPUs and FPGAs are able to accelerate SW and achieve impressive speedups. In this paper we have explored SW acceleration on a heterogeneous platform equipped with an Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. Our evaluation, using the well-known Swiss-Prot database as a benchmark, has shown that a hybrid CPU-Phi heterogeneous system is able to achieve competitive performance (62.6 GCUPS), even with moderate low-level optimisations.