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Accelerating Viterbi algorithm on graphics processing units

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Abstract

Viterbi algorithm is used in different scientific applications including biological sequence alignment, speech recognition, and probabilistic inference. However, high computational complexity of the Viterbi algorithm is a major concern. Accelerating the Viterbi algorithm is important, especially when the number of states or the length of the sequences increase significantly. In this paper, a parallel solution to improve the performance of Viterbi algorithm is presented. This is achieved by formulating a matrix product based algorithm. This algorithm has been mapped to a NVIDIA graphics processing unit. The performance for different parameters and realizations are compared. The results depicts matrix product is not a viable option for small number of states. However, matrix product solution using shared memory for large number of states gains good performance when compared with the serial version.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Government College University, Faisalabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Kashif Hanif

  2. Institute of Embedded Systems, Hamburg University of Technology, 21071, Hamburg, Germany

    Karl-Heinz Zimmermann

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  1. Muhammad Kashif Hanif
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  2. Karl-Heinz Zimmermann
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Correspondence to Muhammad Kashif Hanif.

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Hanif, M.K., Zimmermann, KH. Accelerating Viterbi algorithm on graphics processing units. Computing 99, 1105–1123 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-017-0557-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-017-0557-6

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