Smith-Waterman Alignment of Huge Sequences with GPU in Linear Space

Abstract

Cross-species chromosome alignments can reveal ancestral relationships and may be used to identify the peculiarities of the species. It is thus an important problem in Bioinformatics. So far, aligning huge sequences, such as whole chromosomes, with exact methods has been regarded as unfeasible, due to huge computing and memory requirements. However, high performance computing platforms such as GPUs are being able to change this scenario, making it possible to obtain the exact result for huge sequences in reasonable time. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a parallel algorithm that uses GPU to align huge sequences, executing the Smith-Waterman algorithm combined with Myers-Miller, with linear space complexity. In order to achieve that, we propose optimizations that are able to reduce significantly the amount of data processed and that enforce full parallelism most of the time. Using the GTX 285 Board, our algorithm was able to produce the optimal alignment between sequences composed of 33 Millions of Base Pairs (MBP) and 47 MBP in 18.5 hours.