Accelerating Genome Analysis @ RECOMB-ARCH 2026

Why It Matters

Faster, hardware-optimized genome analysis could dramatically speed diagnosis, outbreak response, and personalized medicine while reducing computation costs; building that capability requires interdisciplinary engineering, community training, and targeted accelerator development. Confidence

Summary

At RECOMB-ARCH 2026, the speaker traced two decades of work at the intersection of computer architecture and bioinformatics, highlighting community growth, education efforts, and the role of hardware-aware system design in genomics. He focused narrowly on accelerating genome sequence analysis—particularly read mapping and base calling—arguing that bespoke accelerators, memory and storage systems, and algorithm–architecture co-design can relieve key bottlenecks. The talk emphasized recent progress, the rising importance of nanopore sequencing, and the need to make bioinformatics accessible to systems engineers. It also called for deeper collaboration with medical researchers to translate fast, scalable genomic analysis into practical clinical and public-health tools.

Original Description

RECOMB-ARCH 2026 (https://events.safari.ethz.ch/fccm2026-omics/)

Date and Time: May 24, from 13:00 EEST - 14:00 EEST

Presenter: Prof. Onur Mutlu

Abstract

Genome analysis is the foundation of many scientific and medical discoveries as well as a key pillar of personalized medicine. After an individual's genome is sequenced, many computational steps are taken to reconstruct and analyze the genome. Unfortunately, these computational tasks are often very slow and energy hungry, in many cases requiring very expensive computational resources. As a result, even though sequencing technology improvements have enabled high-throughput and portable sequencing devices, like nanopore sequencers, interesting and potentially critical analyses still take days or even weeks and also cannot be performed in portable devices.

This talk describes our ongoing journey in greatly improving the performance and energy efficiency of genome analysis (with a focus on at least two major issues in genome analysis, i.e., read mapping and metagenomics analysis). We show that significant improvements are possible with both algorithmic and hardware-based approaches and their combination. We conclude with a foreshadowing of future challenges brought about by very low-cost new sequencing technologies and their potential use cases in public health, science, and medicine.

A short accompanying paper, which appeared at DAC 2023, can be found here and serves as recommended reading: "Accelerating Genome Analysis via Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design".

A longer overview & survey of modern genome analysis and how to make it intelligent and efficient can be found here and also serves as recommended reading: "Going From Molecules to Genomic Variations to Scientific Discovery: Intelligent Algorithms and Architectures for Intelligent Genome Analysis".

Bio

Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He previously held the William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Early Career Professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in computer architecture, computing systems, hardware security, memory & storage systems, and bioinformatics, with a major focus on designing fundamentally energy-efficient, high-performance, and robust computing systems. Many techniques he, with his group and collaborators, has invented over the years have largely influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory & storage systems used daily by billions of people. He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held product, research and visiting positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, Google, and Stanford University. He received various honors for his impactful research, including the 2025 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award “for seminal contributions to computer architecture research and practice, especially in memory systems,” 2024 IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing (for the original RowHammer work), 2021 IEEE High Performance Computer Architecture Conference Test of Time Award (for the Runahead Execution work), 2022 Persistent Impact Prize of the Non-Volatile Memory Systems Workshop (for the original architectural work on Phase Change Memory), 2025 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Test-of-Time Award (for the AVATAR work), 2023 Huawei OlympusMons Award in Storage Systems, 2021 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, 2019 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, and dozens of best paper, “Top Pick” paper, and Best Artifact recognitions at various leading computer systems, architecture, and security venues. He is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and an elected member of the Academy of Europe. He enjoys teaching, mentoring, and enabling & democratizing access to high-quality research and education. He has supervised 26 PhD graduates, many of whom received major dissertation & other awards, more than 20 postdoctoral trainees, and more than 70 Master’s and Bachelor’s students. His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials are freely available on YouTube (Onur Mutlu Lectures and CMU Computer Architecture), and his research group (SAFARI Research Group) makes a wide variety of open-source artifacts freely available online (CMU-SAFARI on GitHub). For more information, please see his webpage at people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu.