Acceleration of the Pair-HMM Algorithm for DNA Variant Calling

Abstract

In this project, we propose an SoC solution to accelerate the Pair-HMM's forward algorithm which is the key performance bottleneck in the GATK's HaplotypeCaller tool for DNA variant calling. We develop two versions of the Pair-HMM accelerator: one using High Level Synthesis (HLS), and another ring-based manual RTL implementation. We investigate the performance of the manual RTL design and HLS design in terms of design flexibility and overall run-time. We achieve a significant speed-up of up to 19x through the HLS implementation and speed-up of up to 95x through the RTL implementation of the algorithm.