Efficient Architecture-Aware Acceleration of BWA-MEM for Multicore Systems

Innovations in Next-Generation Sequencing are enabling generation of DNA sequence data at ever faster rates and at very low cost. For example, the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 sequencer can generate 6 Terabases of data in less than two days, sequencing nearly 20 Billion short DNA fragments called reads at the low cost of $1000 per human genome. Large sequencing centers typically employ hundreds of such systems. Such highthroughput and low-cost generation of data underscores the need for commensurate acceleration in downstream computational analysis of the sequencing data. A fundamental step in downstream analysis is mapping of the reads to a long reference DNA sequence, such as a reference human genome. Sequence…