Protein databases have grown exponentially over the last decade. This exponential growth has made extracting valuable information from these databases increasingly time consuming. This project presents a new method of accelerating a commonly used program for performing similarity searching on protein databases, BLASTP. This project describes the design and implementation of Mercury BLASTP, a customized hardware accelerated variant of BLASTP. This project focuses on the gapped alignment stage of Mercury BLASTP and provides design details and implementation results
