GPU-Accelerated Large-Scale Genome Assembly

Abstract

Spurred by a widening gap between hardware accelerators and traditional processors, numerous bioinformatics applications have harnessed the computing power of GPUs and reported substantial performance improvements compared to their CPU-based counterparts. However, most of these GPU-based applications only focus on the read alignment problem, while the field of de novo assembly still relies mostly on CPU-based solutions. This is primarily due to the nature of the assembly workload which is not only compute-intensive but also extremely data-intensive. Such workloads require large memories, making it difficult to adapt them to use GPUs with their limited memory capacities. To the best of our knowledge, no GPU-based assembler reported in the recent literature has attempted to assemble datasets larger than a few tens of gigabytes, whereas real sequence datasets are often several hundreds of gigabytes in size. In this paper, we present a new GPU-accelerated genome assembler called LaSAGNA, which can assemble large-scale sequence datasets using a single GPU by building string graphs from approximate all-pair overlaps. LaSAGNA can also run on multiple GPUs across multiple compute nodes connected by a high-speed network to expedite the assembly process. To utilize the limited memory on GPUs efficiently, LaSAGNA uses a semi-streaming approach that makes at most a logarithmic number of passes over the input data based on the available memory. Moreover, we propose a two-level streaming model, from disk to host memory and from host memory to device memory, to minimize disk I/O. Using LaSAGNA, we can assemble a 400 GB human genome dataset on a single NVIDIA K40 GPU in 17 hours, and in a little over 5 hours on an 8-node cluster of NVIDIA K20s.

Publication
In 2018 International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), IEEE.
Sayan Goswami
Sayan Goswami
Postdoctoral Researcher

My research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing and programmable matter.