BioHD: an efficient genome sequence search platform using HyperDimensional memorization

Abstract

In this paper, we propose BioHD, a novel genomic sequence searching platform based on Hyper-Dimensional Computing (HDC) for hardware-friendly computation. BioHD transforms inherent sequential processes of genome matching to highly-parallelizable computation tasks. We exploit HDC memorization to encode and represent the genome sequences using high-dimensional vectors. Then, it combines the genome sequences to generate an HDC reference library. During the sequence searching, BioHD performs exact or approximate similarity check of an encoded query with the HDC reference library. Our framework simplifies the required sequence matching operations while introducing a statistical model to control the alignment quality. To get actual advantage from BioHD inherent robustness and parallelism, we design a processing in-memory (PIM) architecture with massive parallelism and compatible with the existing crossbar memory. Our PIM architecture supports all essential BioHD operations natively in memory with minimal modification on the array. We evaluate BioHD accuracy and efficiency on a wide range of genomics data, including COVID-19 databases. Our results indicate that PIM provides 102.8× and 116.1× (9.3× and 13.2×) speedup and energy efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art pattern matching algorithm running on GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU (state-of-the-art PIM accelerator).