High speed emulation of gene regulatory networks using FPGAs

Discovering attractors in gene regulatory networks is an important aspect for research in genetics. It is a very computing intensive and memory demanding task. We show a very efficient approach with impressive results to deal with this task using a platform containing an ARM and a medium size FPGA. While a pure software solution could not handle more than 15 genes due to memory constraints. The FPGA solution could handle hundreds of genes. Gains of three orders of magnitude have been reached compared to a pure software approach.