Protein-protein docking on hardware accelerators: comparison of GPU and MIC architectures

The hardware accelerators will provide solutions to computationally complex problems in bioinformatics fields. However, the effect of acceleration depends on the nature of the application, thus selection of an appropriate accelerator requires some consideration.

In the present study, we compared the effects of acceleration using graphics processing unit (GPU) and many integrated core (MIC) on the speed of fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based protein-protein docking calculation. The GPU implementation performed the protein-protein docking calculations approximately five times faster than the MIC offload mode implementation. The MIC native mode implementation has the advantage in the implementation costs. However, the performance was worse with larger protein pairs because of memory limitations.

The results suggest that GPU is more suitable than MIC for accelerating FFT-based protein-protein docking applications.