RISC-V for Genome Data Analysis: Opportunities and Challenges

The RISC-V ISA has gained significant momentum in High-Performance Computing (HPC) research and market due to its open-source nature, fostering collaborative research and innovation. The ever-growing RISC-V-based hardware/software ecosystem has made it an attractive option for HPC application development and production. Within the field of biomedical research, genome data analysis has emerged as a crucial step towards personalized medicine, demanding substantial computational resources and more efficient tools. This paper presents a benchmark suite of genome analysis kernels ported to RISC-V and their evaluation on modern RISC-V systems. Our work evaluates the RISC-V toolchain's maturity and the software/hardware ecosystem's readiness for its adoption for genome data analysis. This study aims to provide valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners interested in adopting RISC-V for genome analysis, and provides feedback to the RISC-V community on the challenges that need to be addressed for RISC-V to become an efficient HPC platform.