Motivation: New high-throughput sequencing technologies have promoted the production of short reads with dramatically low unit cost. The explosive growth of short read datasets poses a challenge to the mapping of short reads to reference genomes, such as the human genome, in terms of alignment quality and execution speed.

Results: We present CUSHAW, a parallelized short read aligner based on the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) parallel programming model. We exploit CUDA-compatible graphics hardware as accelerators to achieve fast speed. Our algorithm employs a quality-aware bounded search approach based on the Burrows- Wheeler transform (BWT) and the Ferragina Manzini (FM)-index to reduce the search space and achieve high alignment quality. Performance evaluation, using simulated as well as real short read datasets, reveals that our algorithm running on one or two graphics processing units (GPUs) achieves significant speedups in terms of execution time, while yielding comparable or even better alignment quality for paired-end alignments compared to three popular BWT-based aligners: Bowtie, BWA and SOAP2. CUSHAW also delivers competitive performance in terms of SNP calling for an E.coli test dataset.

Availability: http://cushaw.sourceforge.net.

(Y. Liu, B. Schmidt, D. Maskell: “CUSHAW: a CUDA compatible short read aligner to large genomes based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform”, Bioinformatics, 2012. [DOI])

Read more in the full announcement.

Breadth-first search (BFS) is a core primitive for graph traversal and a basis for many higher-level graph analysis algorithms. It is also representative of a class of parallel computations whose memory accesses and work distribution are both irregular and data-dependent. Recent work has demonstrated the plausibility of GPU sparse graph traversal, but has tended to focus on asymptotically inefficient algorithms that perform poorly on graphs with non-trivial diameter.

We present a BFS parallelization focused on fine-grained task management constructed from efficient prefix sum that achieves an asymptotically optimal O(|V|+|E|) work complexity. Our implementation delivers excellent performance on diverse graphs, achieving traversal rates in excess of 3.3 billion and 8.3 billion traversed edges per second using single and quad-GPU configurations, respectively. This level of performance is several times faster than state-of-the-art implementations both CPU and GPU platforms.

(Duane Merrill, Michael Garland and  Andrew Grimshaw: “Scalable GPU graph traversal”, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP’12), pp.117-128, Feburary 2012. [DOI])

Delivered by Acceleware Developers, who provide real world experience and examples, the training comprises of classroom lectures and hands-on tutorials. Each student will be supplied with a laptop equipped with NVIDIA GPUs for the duration of the course. Small class sizes maximize learning and ensure a personal educational experience.

More information: http://www.acceleware.com/may8calgary

The paper submission deadline has just been extended to April 20, 2012. The conference takes place June 2 and 3, 2012, in Edinburgh, UK. More Information: http://www.ukpew.org