The BioSCAN project involves the design and construction of a computer system for very rapid comparison of protein and DNA sequences, built abound a special-purpose VLSI chip designed and manufactured specifically for the project. The work has been conducted primarily by the Computer Science Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under a grant from the NSF.However, I have been involved as a consultant on the design and use of the system. This past year, the chip design and manufacture has been completed,and four working computer boards have been constructed, one of which has been installed in a machine at the NCBI for testing. The system can compare a sequence of length 13,000 with a sequence database at the rate of about 2,000,000 characters per second. The project is currently in the software development stage, with the goal of making a BLAST-like server from a BioSCAN board.
