Abstract
Sequence alignment is a fundamental task for computational genomics research. We develop G-Aligner, which adopts the GPU as a hardware accelerator to speed up the sequence alignment process. A leading CPU-based alignment tool is based on the Bi-BWT index; however, a direct implementation of this algorithm on the GPU cannot fully utilize the hardware power due to its irregular algorithmic structure. To better utilize the GPU hardware resource, we propose a filtering-verification algorithm employing both the Bi-BWT search and direct matching. We further improve this algorithm on the GPU through various optimizations, e.g., the split of a large kernel, the warp based implementation to avoid user-level synchronization. As a result, G-Aligner outperforms another state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated alignment tools SOAP3 by 1.8–3.5 times for in-memory sequence alignment.
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Communicated by Judy Qiu and Dennis Gannon.
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Lu, M., Tan, Y., Bai, G. et al. High-performance short sequence alignment with GPU acceleration. Distrib Parallel Databases 30, 385–399 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-012-7099-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-012-7099-x