In this paper, we propose a fine-grained cycle sharing (FGCS) system capable of exploiting idle graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerating sequence homology search in local area network environments. Our system exploits short idle periods on GPUs by running small parts of guest programs such that each part can be completed within hundreds of milliseconds. To detect such short idle periods from the pool of registered resources, our system continuously monitors keyboard and mouse activities via event handlers rather than waiting for a screensaver, as is typically deployed in existing systems. Our system also divides guest tasks into small parts according to a performance model that estimates execution times of the parts. This task division strategy minimizes any disruption to the owners of the GPU resources. Experimental results show that our FGCS system running on two non-dedicated GPUs achieves 111-116% of the throughput achieved by a single dedicated GPU. Furthermore, our system provides over two times the throughput of a screensaver-based system. We also show that the idle periods detected by our system constitute half of the system uptime. We believe that the GPUs hidden and often unused in office environments provide a powerful solution to sequence homology search.

(Fumihiko Ino, Yuma Munekawa, and Kenichi Hagihara, “Sequence Homology Search using Fine-Grained Cycle Sharing of Idle GPUs”, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Sep. 2011. [DOI])

This paper describes the approach and the speedup obtained in performing Smith-Waterman database searches on heterogeneous platforms comprising of multi core CPU and multi GPU systems. Most of the advanced and optimized Smith-Waterman algorithm versions have demonstrated remarkable speedup over NCBI BLAST versions, viz., SWPS3 based on x86 SSE2 instructions and CUDASW++ v2.0 CUDA implementation on GPU. This work proposes a hybrid Smith-Waterman algorithm that integrates the state-of-the art CPU and GPU solutions for accelerating Smith-Waterman algorithm in which GPU acts as a co-processor and shares the workload with the CPU enabling us to realize remarkable performance of over 70 GCUPS resulting from simultaneous CPU-GPU execution. In this work, both CPU and GPU are graded equally in performance for Smith-Waterman rather than previous approaches of porting the computationally intensive portions onto the GPUs or a naive multi-core CPU approach.

(J. Singh and I. Aruni: “Accelerating Smith-Waterman on Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Systems”, Proceedings of Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (iCBBE), May 2011. [DOI])

Proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules form a dense network of molecular interactions in a cell. The architecture of molecular networks can reveal important principles of cellular organization and function, similarly to the way that protein structure tells us about the function and organization of a protein. Protein complexes are groups of proteins that interact with each other at the same time and place, forming a single multimolecular machine. Functional modules, in contrast, consist of proteins that participate in a particular cellular process while binding each other at a different time and place.

A protein-protein interaction network is represented as proteins are nodes and interactions between proteins are edges. Protein complexes and functional modules can be identified as highly interconnected subgraphs and computational methods are now inevitable to detect them from protein interaction data. In addition, High-throughput screening techniques such as yeast two-hybrid screening enable identification of detailed protein-protein interactions map in multiple species. As the interaction dataset increases, the scale of interconnected protein networks increases exponentially so that the increasing complexity of network gives computational challenges to analyze the networks.

Graphics hardware is recently widely used in high-performance computing due to its cost effectiveness. Bioinformatics applications also exploit GPU as a massive parallel multi-core processor to address computational challenges in the many areas such as sequence analysis and protein structure prediction. However, few attempts have been made to analyze biological networks.

We present a fast parallel implementation using commodity graphics hardware based a well-known sequential complex finding algorithm of MCODE to address the computational challenge. Our parallel algorithm is implemented on the NVIDIA parallel computing architecture of CUDA. It is evaluated for a various kinds of large-scale PPI networks. Our GPU accelerated implementation using the latest NVIDIA graphics hardware achieves a speedup of two orders of magnitudes compared to the original MCODE in the latest CPU for large-scale protein-protein interaction networks.

(Jun Sung Yoon and Won-Hyung Jung, “A GPU-accelerated bioinformatics application for large-scale protein interaction networks”, Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference, 2011. [pdf] [Project Webpage])

Searching a database of protein structures for matches to a query structure, or occurrences of a structural motif, is an important task in structural biology and bioinformatics. While there are many existing methods for structural similarity searching, faster and more accurate approaches are still required, and few current methods are capable of substructure (motif) searching.

We developed an improved heuristic for tableau-based protein structure and substructure searching using simulated annealing, that is as fast or faster, and comparable in accuracy, with some widely used existing methods. Furthermore, we created a parallel implementation on a modern graphics processing unit (GPU). The GPU implementation achieves up to 34 times speedup over the CPU implementation of tableau-based structure search with simulated annealing, making it one of the fastest available methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a GPU to the protein structural search problem.

(Stivala, A. and Stuckey, P. and Wirth, A.: “Fast and accurate protein substructure searching with simulated annealing and GPUs”. BMC Bioinformatics, 11:446, Sep. 2010, DOI)

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)