Harnessing the power of idle GPUs for acceleration of biological sequence alignment

Abstract

This paper presents a parallel system capable of accelerating biological sequence alignment on the graphics processing unit (GPU) grid. The GPU grid in this paper is a desktop grid system that utilizes idle GPUs and CPUs in the office and home. Our parallel implementation employs a master-worker paradigm to accelerate Liu's OpenGL-based algorithm that runs on a single GPU. We integrate this implementation into a screensaver-based grid system that detects idle resources on which the alignment code can run. We also show some experimental results comparing our implementation with three different implementations running on a single GPU, a single CPU, or multiple CPUs. As a result, we find that a single non-dedicated GPU can provide us almost the same throughput as two dedicated CPUs in our laboratory environment, where GPU-equipped machines are ordinarily used to develop GPU applications.