Overview

The Second RECOMB Satellite Conference on Hardware Acceleration of Bioinformatics Workloads (RECOMB-Arch 2027) will take place in Toronto, Canada (May 16, 2027), just before the main RECOMB conference. RECOMB-Arch brings together researchers in the bioinformatics, computational biology, and computer architecture communities to strengthen the progress in accelerating bioinformatics analysis (e.g., genome, transcriptome, proteome analysis) with efficient system designs that include hardware acceleration and software systems tailored for new hardware technologies, including compiler optimizations, APIs, and DSLs that support acceleration platforms.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Hardware-Accelerated Genomic Data Processing

  • Optimized hardware/algorithms for read mapping, whole-genome alignment, and de novo assembly acceleration
  • Architectures for high-throughput genomic data streaming and pre-processing (e.g., base calling, demultiplexing)

Hardware Acceleration Techniques and Architectures

  • FPGA, GPU, ASIC, PIM (Processing-In-Memory), and NPU (Neural Processing Unit) accelerators for core bioinformatics algorithms
  • Hardware/software co-design for computational biology
  • Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) for bioinformatics workloads (e.g., aligners, variant callers)
  • Novel memory architectures and I/O optimization for large genomic datasets

Accelerating Downstream Bioinformatics Analysis

  • Hardware-aware algorithms for metagenomics, pan-genomics, and genome graph traversal
  • High-speed solutions for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data processing (e.g., UMI counting, clustering, dimensionality reduction)
  • Structural biology and drug design
  • Optimization of machine learning/deep learning models (e.g., CNNs, RNNs, Transformers) used in omics for specialized hardware

Tools, Languages, and Infrastructure

  • Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and high-level synthesis tools for programming bioinformatics hardware accelerators
  • Static and dynamic optimization passes for bioinformatics workloads
  • Optimized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for heterogeneous computing platforms for bioinformatics pipelines
  • Benchmarking, performance modeling, and energy-efficiency analysis of bioinformatics accelerators
  • Cloud and edge computing architectures for accelerated bioinformatics

Specific Accelerated Bioinformatics Workloads

  • Accelerating dynamic programming algorithms (e.g., Smith-Waterman, Needleman-Wunsch) and their approximations
  • Efficient hardware implementations of compression algorithms for genomic data
  • Accelerated methods for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and population genetics
  • Hardware-optimized data structures (e.g., k-mer indices, Bloom filters, FM-index, learned indexes)

Key Dates

Papers

  • Abstract submission deadline: February 1, 2027, 23:59 AoE
  • Full paper submission deadline: February 6, 2027, 23:59 AoE
  • Author notification: March 7, 2027

Short talks and posters

  • Submission deadline: March 24, 2027, 23:59 AoE
  • Author notification: Rolling, shortly after submission

Tracks and Submission Guidelines

To be announced.