Abstract:

MUMmerGPU uses highly-parallel commodity graphics processing units (GPU) to accelerate the data-intensive computation of aligning next generation DNA sequence data to a reference sequence for use in diverse applications such as disease genotyping and personal genomics. MUMmerGPU 2.0 features a new stackless depth-first-search print kernel and is 13× faster than the serial CPU version of the alignment code and nearly 4× faster in total computation time than MUMmerGPU 1.0. We exhaustively examined 128 GPU data layout configurations to improve register footprint and running time and conclude higher occupancy has greater impact than reduced latency. MUMmerGPU is available open-source at http://www.mummergpu.sourceforge.net.

(Trapnell, C, Schatz, MC (2009) Optimizing data intensive GPGPU computations for DNA sequence alignment. Parallel Computing doi:10.1016/j.parco.2009.05.002)

The Smith-Waterman algorithm has been available for more than 25 years. It is based on a dynamic programming approach that explores all the possible alignments between two biological sequences; as a result it returns the optimal local alignment. Unfortunately, the computational cost is very high, requiring a number of operations proportional to the product of the length of two sequences. This paper by Svetlin Manavski and Giorgio Valle describes SmithWaterman-CUDA, an open-source project to perform fast sequence alignment on the GPU. Although the software performs the optimal Smith-Waterman alignment it is faster than heuristics approaches like FASTA and BLAST. The tests on protein data banks show up to 30x speed up related to reference CPU implementations. (Svetlin A. Manavski, Giorgio Valle, CUDA compatible GPU cards as efficient hardware accelerators for Smith-Waterman sequence alignment, BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9(Suppl 2):S10 (26 March 2008))

The recent availability of new, less expensive high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies has yielded a dramatic increase in the volume of sequence data that must be analyzed. by University of Maryland researchers Michael Schatz, Cole Trapnell, Art Delcher, and Amitabh Varshney describes MUMmerGPU, an open-source high-throughput parallel pairwise local sequence alignment program that runs on GPUs. MUMmerGPU uses the new Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) from nVidia to align multiple query sequences against a single reference sequence stored as a suffix tree. By processing the queries in parallel on the graphics card, MUMmerGPU achieves more than a 10-fold speedup over a serial CPU version of the sequence alignment kernel, despite the very low arithmetic intensity of the task. (High-throughput sequence alignment using Graphics Processing Units, Schatz, M.C., Trapnell, C., Delcher, A.L., Varshney, A. (2007), BMC Bioinformatics 8:474.)

This article at Genome Technology gives a brief overview of GPGPU, with a focus on biological information processing using NVIDIA CUDA Technology. The article discusses the results from UIUC’s NAMD / VMD project and neurological simulation company Evolved Machines.

Bioinformatics applications are one of the most compute-demanding applications today. While traditionally these applications are executed on cluster or dedicated parallel systems, this paper by M. Charalambous, P. Trancoso, and A. Stamatikis at the University of Cyprus and FORTH explores the use of an alternative architecture. The authors focus on exploiting the characteristics offered by the graphics processors (GPU) in order to accelerate a bioinformatics application. This paper presents the initial results on porting RAxML, a bioinformatics program for phylogenetic tree inference, to the GPU. (Initial Experiences Porting a Bioinformatics Application to a Graphics Processor. M. Charalambous, P. Trancoso, and A. Stamatakis. Proceedings of the 10th Panhellenic Conference in Informatics (PCI 2005))