Parallel Fine-Grained Comparison of Long DNA Sequences in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous GPU Platforms With Pruning

Abstract

The parallelization of Smith-Waterman (SW) sequence comparison tools for long DNA sequences has been a big challenge over the years, requesting the use of several devices and sophisticated optimizations. Pruning is one of these optimizations, which can reduce considerably the amount of computation. This article proposes MultiBP, a sequence comparison solution in multiple GPUs with block pruning. Two MultiBP strategies are proposed. In static score-sharing, workload is statically distributed to the GPUs, and the best score is sent to neighbor GPUs to simulate a global view. In the dynamic strategy, execution is divided into cycles and workload is dynamically assigned, according to the GPUs processing rate. MultiBP was integrated to MASA-CUDAlign and tested in homogeneous and heterogeneous platforms, with different NVidia GPU architectures. The best results in our homogeneous and heterogeneous platforms were mostly obtained by the static and dynamic approaches, respectively. We also show that our decision module is able to select the best strategy in most cases. Finally, the comparison of the human and chimpanzee chromosomes 1 in a cluster with 512 V100 NVidia GPUs took 11 minutes and obtained the impressive rate of 82,822 GCUPS (Billions of Cells Updated per Second) which is, to our knowledge, the best performance for SW tools in GPUs.