• Team Advisors

  • Dr. Adrienne Breland(CSE)

  • Dr. Grant Hennig(MD)

  • Dr. Frederick Harris(CSE)

  • Dr. Sergui Dascalu(CSE, Instructor)

aboutSMG

The project that Team 6 was developed for the CS 425 Software Engineering course and the CS 426 Senior Projects course at the University of Nevada Reno. SMG is an RNA Sequence Matching program. The program was developed in cooperation with the UNR Medical School. The RNA Sequence Matching program has the capability of taking multiple RNA sequences and run them through a comparing algorithm to find all matches within a DNA file and return the location and other information about the RNA sequence in a manner that is simple and easy to read, but at the same time contain all the information that the user needs. SMG also contains a 2D graphical representation of the DNA sequence that the user can look at to easily find patters with in the sequences. The main issue is that, because of the size of the DNA files this comparing process can take days to complete, depending on the DNA file. To tackle the time issue the team implemented the program not on the CPU but the GPU. The reason that the team chose to use the GPU is because the GPU has a lot more processing power when compared to the CPU. Since there is such a large increase in processing power the programs running time can be cut down tremendously. The advantage of a faster running RNA sequencer is that it has the capability of cutting down the research time of biologists, and by cutting down on research time the team hopes that more experiments can be conducted that will help the general public by finding causes of diseases, finding of more cures, and better gene therapy.

SMG was presented during the Spring 2012 Computer Science and Engineering workshop. The team would like to thank Dr. Dascalu, Dr. Breland, and Dr. Hennig for their support for this project. A special thanks to Dr. Harris for letting us eat all his food and use his lab, and to Tor and Roger.