Review of Bioinformatics Application Using Intel MIC

As the next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology develops rapidly recently, the ever-increasing biological sequence data poses a tremendous challenge to data processing. Speeding up data analyzing using intensive computing power is a hot topic. 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 widely-used parallel computing platform for decreasing the computational cost of the most demanding processes in bioinformatics. To help researchers make better use of MIC, we summarize the MIC-based bioinformatics applications involving genomics, proteomics, pharmacology, phylogenetics and epigenetics. We believe that this review provides a comprehensive guideline for bioinformatics researchers to apply MIC in their own fields.