Performance and economic evaluations in adopting low power architectures: A real case analysis

The continuous technological advances made the energy efficiency a major topic for greener Information Technology systems. Low power Systems-on-Chip (SoC), originally developed in the context of mobile and embedded technologies, are becoming attractive also for scientific and industrial applications given their increasing computing performances, coupled with relatively low cost and power demands. In this work, we investigate the potential of the most representative SoCs for a real life application taken from the field of molecular biology. In particular, we investigate the opportunity of using SoCs for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) analysis, considering different applicative scenarios, with different timing and costs requirements. We evaluate the achievable performance together with economical aspects related to the total cost of ownership for a small medium enterprise offering services of NGS sequence alignment, supporting analysis performed in hospitals, research institutes, farms and industries.