  DNA sequence classification is a fundamental task in computational biology
with vast implications for applications such as disease prevention and drug
design. Therefore, fast high-quality sequence classifiers are significantly
important. This paper introduces ClaPIM, a scalable DNA sequence classification
architecture based on the emerging concept of hybrid in-crossbar and
near-crossbar memristive processing-in-memory (PIM). We enable efficient and
high-quality classification by uniting the filter and search stages within a
single algorithm. Specifically, we propose a custom filtering technique that
drastically narrows the search space and a search approach that facilitates
approximate string matching through a distance function. ClaPIM is the first
PIM architecture for scalable approximate string matching that benefits from
the high density of memristive crossbar arrays and the massive computational
parallelism of PIM. Compared with Kraken2, a state-of-the-art software
classifier, ClaPIM provides significantly higher classification quality (up to
20x improvement in F1 score) and also demonstrates a 1.8x throughput
improvement. Compared with EDAM, a recently-proposed SRAM-based accelerator
that is restricted to small datasets, we observe both a 30.4x improvement in
normalized throughput per area and a 7% increase in classification precision.
