The research and methods in the field of computational biology have grown in the last decades, thanks to the availability of biological data. One of the applications in computational biology is genome sequencing or sequence alignment, a method to arrange sequences of, for example, DNA or RNA, to determine regions of similarity between these sequences. Sequence alignment applications include public health purposes, such as monitoring antimicrobial resistance.
Demand for fast sequence alignment has led to the usage of data structures, such as the de Bruijn graph, to store a large amount of information efficiently. De Bruijn graphs are currently one of the top data structures used in indexing genome sequences, and different methods to represent them have been explored. One of these methods is the BOSS data structure, a special case of Wheeler graph index, which uses succinct data structures to represent a de Bruijn graph.
As genomes can take a large amount of space, the construction of succinct de Bruijn graphs is slow. This has led to experimental research on using large-scale cluster engines such as Apache Spark and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) in genome data processing.
This thesis explores the use of Apache Spark and Spark RAPIDS, a GPU computing library for Apache Spark, in the construction of a succinct de Bruijn graph index from genome sequences. The experimental results indicate that Spark RAPIDS can provide up to 8 times speedups to specific operations, but for some other operations has severe limitations that limit its processing power in terms of succinct de Bruijn graph index construction
