Analyzing large-scale DNA Sequences on Multi-core Architectures

Rapid analysis of DNA sequences is important in preventing the evolution of different viruses and bacteria during an early phase, early diagnosis of genetic predispositions to certain diseases (cancer, cardiovascular diseases), and in DNA forensics. However, real-world DNA sequences may comprise several Gigabytes and the process of DNA analysis demands adequate computational resources to be completed within a reasonable time. In this paper we present a scalable approach for parallel DNA analysis that is based on Finite Automata, and which is suitable for analyzing very large DNA segments. We evaluate our approach for real-world DNA segments of mouse (2.7GB), cat (2.4GB), dog (2.4GB), chicken (1GB), human (3.2GB) and turkey (0.2GB). Experimental results on a dual-socket shared-memory system with 24 physical cores show speed-ups of up to 17.6x. Our approach is up to 3x faster than a pattern-based parallel approach that uses the RE2 library.Comment: The 18th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE 2015), Porto, Portugal, 20 - 23 October 201

Manycore high-performance computing in bioinformatics

Mining the increasing amount of genomic data requires having very efficient tools. Increasing the efficiency can be obtained with better algorithms, but one could also take advantage of the hardware itself to reduce the application runtimes. Since a few years, issues with heat dissipation prevent the processors from having higher frequencies. One of the answers to maintain Moore's Law is parallel processing. Grid environments provide tools for effective implementation of coarse grain parallelization. Recently, another kind of hardware has attracted interest: multicore processors. Graphic processing units (GPUs) are a first step towards massively multicore processors. They allow everyone to have some teraflops of cheap computing power in its personal computer. The CUDA library (released in 2007) and the new standard OpenCL (specified in 2008) make programming of such devices very convenient. OpenCL is likely to gain a wide industrial support and to become a standard of choice for parallel programming. In all cases, the best speedups are obtained when combining precise algorithmic studies with a knowledge of the computing architectures. This is especially true with the memory hierarchy: the algorithms have to find a good balance between using large (and slow) global memories and some fast (but small) local memories. In this chapter, we will show how those manycore devices enable more efficient bioinformatics applications. We will first give some insights into architectures and parallelism. Then we will describe recent implementations specifically designed for manycore architectures, including algorithms on sequence alignment and RNA structure prediction. We will conclude with some thoughts about the dissemination of those algorithms and implementations: are they today available on the bookshelf for everyone

High Performance Implementation of Planted Motif Problem using Suffix trees

In this paper we present a high performance implementation of suffix tree based solution to the planted motif problem on two different parallel architectures: NVIDIA GPU and Intel Multicore machines. An (l,d) planted motif problem(PMP) is defined as: Given a sequence of n DNA sequences, each of length L, find M, the set of sequences(or motifs) of length l which have atleast one d-neighbor in each of the n sequences. Here, a d-neighbor of a sequence is a sequence of same length that differs in at-most d positions. PMP is a well studied problem in computational biology. It is useful in developing methods for finding transcription factor binding sites, sequence classification and for building phylogenetic trees. The problem is computationally challenging to solve, for example a (19,7) PMP takes 9.9 hours on a sequential machine. Many approaches to solve planted motif problem can be found in literature. One approach is based on use of suffix tree data structure. Though suffix tree based methods are the most efficient ones for solving large planted motif problems on sequential machines, they are quite difficult to parallelize. We present suffix tree based parallel solutions for PMP on NVIDIA GPU and Intel Multicore architectures that are efficient and scalable. The solutions are based on a suffix tree algorithm previously presented but use extensive adaptation to individual architectures to ensure that the implementations work efficiently and scale well