Trends of Intel MIC Application In Bioinformatics

With the rapid development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, the ever-increasing biological sequence data poses a tremendous challenge to data processing. Therefore, there is an urgent need for intensive computing power to speed up the data analysis process. Among the state-of-the-art parallel accelerators, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor is a bootable host processor based on Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that provides massive parallelism and vectorization to support the most demanding high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The underlying x86 architecture supports common parallel programming standard libraries that provide familiarity and flexibility to transplant existing code to heterogeneous computing environments. In addition, it delivers three usage model including native, offload and symmetric models to solve different application problems on the MIC-based neo-heterogeneous architectures. Currently, Intel Xeon Phi is becoming a common parallel computing platform for decreasing the computational cost of the most demanding processes in bioinformatics. To help researchers make better use of MIC, we reviewed the MIC-based bioinformatics applications, providing a comprehensive guideline for bioinformatics researchers to apply MIC in their own fields.