Title: Analysing the performance of personal computers based on Intel microprocessors for sequence aligning bioinformatics applications

Authors: Pradeep S. Nair, Eugene B. John

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA

Abstract: Aligning specific sequences against a very large number of other sequences is a central aspect of bioinformatics. With the widespread availability of personal computers in biology laboratories, sequence alignment is now often performed locally. This makes it necessary to analyse the performance of personal computers for sequence aligning bioinformatics benchmarks. In this paper, we analyse the performance of a personal computer for the popular BLAST and FASTA sequence alignment suites. Results indicate that these benchmarks have a large number of recurring operations and use memory operations extensively. It seems that the performance can be improved with a bigger L1-cache.

Keywords: performance evaluation; benchmarking; sequence alignment; personal computers; PC performance; bioinformatics; Intel microprocessors; performance improvement; biological sequences; DNA; protein sequences.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2007.013602

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2007 Vol.3 No.2, pp.187 - 205

Published online: 09 May 2007 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article