Abstract: Disclosed herein is a hardware implementation for performing sequence alignment that preferably deploys a seed generation stage, an ungapped extension stage, and at least a portion of a gapped extension stage as a data processing pipeline on at least one hardware logic device. Hardware circuits for the seed generation stage, the ungapped extension stage, and the gapped extension stage are individually disclosed. In a preferred embodiment, the pipeline is arranged for performing BLASTP sequence alignment searching. Also, in a preferred embodiment, the at least one hardware logic device comprises at least one reconfigurable logic device such as an FPGA.

Abstract: A system and method for performing biological sequence similarity searching is disclosed. This includes a programmable logic device configured to include a pipeline that comprises a matching stage, the matching stage being configured to receive a data stream comprising a plurality of possible matches between a plurality of biological sequence data strings and a plurality of substrings of a query string. The pipeline may further include a ungapped extension prefilter stage located downstream from the matching stage, the prefilter stage being configured to shift through pattern matches between the biological sequence data strings and the plurality of substrings of a query string and provide a score so that only pattern matches that exceed a user defined score will pass downstream from the prefilter stage. The matching stage may include at least one Bloom filter.