Multimedia technology boosts search speed

Sencel's software uses advanced parallel technology to achieve its high speed. Below please find a brief introduction to this technology.

Previously, if you wanted to run the most sensitive searches at high speed you would need to buy extremely expensive special purpose hardware that could not be used for other computing purposes.

Today, most microprocessors contain embedded technology known as multimedia technology that is ordinarily used for signal processing of images, video and sound. This technology may be used when you play DVDs, games or music on your PC. The multimedia technology is also called SIMD technology from the Single Instruction Multiple Data form of parallelism that it represents.

As shown in the figure below, this technology enables the microprocessor to handle e.g. 8 independent simple arithmetic operations on small numbers simultaneously instead of a single arithmetic operation on very big numbers. As computer technology is growing from 32 to 64 bit processing and further, such technology is becoming increasingly important.

The multimedia technology is not used by ordinary compilers because it is difficult to implement efficiently. Accordingly, it requires special effort using advanced assembly language programming. To make the code work efficiently, it is necessary to put a lot of effort into optimization and adaptation to each type of microprocessor.

This technology is available in almost all modern general-purpose microprocessors as shown in the table below:

Vendor	Microprocessor	Technology	Parallel operations
AMD	K6	MMX	2, 4, 8
	K6-2, K6-III, Athlon, Duron (some)	MMX, 3DNow!, Enhanced 3DNow!	2, 4, 8
	Duron (some), Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 4	MMX, 3DNow!, Enhanced 3DNow!, 3DNow! Professional	2, 4, 8
	Athlon 64, Opteron	MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2	2, 4, 8, 16
HP	Alpha 21264 (EV6) Alpha 21264 (EV67) Alpha 21264 (EV68)	MVI	8
HP	PA-8000* PA-8200* PA-8500* PA-8600* PA-8700*	MAX-2	2, 4
IBM	PowerPC 970 (G5)	AltiVec (Velocity Engine)	2, 4, 8, 16
Intel	Pentium MMX, Celeron (some), Pentium II	MMX	2, 4, 8
	Celeron (some), Pentium III	MMX, SSE	2, 4, 8
	Celeron (some) Pentium 4, Xeon, Xeon MP	MMX, SSE, SSE2	2, 4, 8, 16
	Itanium*, Itanium2		2, 4, 8
Motorola	PowerPC G4	AltiVec (Velocity Engine)	2, 4, 8, 16
Sun	UltraSPARC*	VIS	2, 4

As this technology is available in very common, inexpensive and high-volume hardware it is a very cost-efficient way of performing genetic sequence comparisons.

Until recently, this technology had not been taken into use by the software used for sequence alignments and database searches. However, this technology has proven very useful in sequence comparisons.

Using multimedia technology, Sencel has developed software that achieves a much higher speed than was previously available. Sencel has applied for several patents on its high-performance implementations.

Thanks to this technology, you can now make sense of sequence data in less time, at lower cost, and with better precision.

* currently not supported by Sencels software.