Optimizing Smith-Waterman for the Cell Broadband Engine
Michael S. Farrar · 2008
Motivation: As new processors become available, the SingleInstruction Multiple-Data Smith-Waterman implementations need to be adapted to the processors instruction set to get maximum performance. One recent processor, the Cell Broadband Engine has eight independent vector processors. To take advantage of the Cell’s vector engines, the implementation needs to take into account the limited resources of the vector engine and the limits of the instruction set. Results: The adapted Smith-Waterman implementation running on a single 3.2 GHz Cell Broadband Engine achieved speeds of >16 billion cell update per second with the ability to handle sequences of 32K residues. Availability: http://farrar.michael.googlepages.com/striped.tgz