Accelerating Partitional Algorithms for Flow Cytometry on GPUs

Like many modern techniques for scientific analysis, flow cytometry produces massive amounts of data that must be analyzed and clustered intelligently to be useful. Current manual binning techniques are cumbersome and limited in both the quality and quantity of analysis produced. To address the quality of results, a new framework applying two different sets of clustering algorithms and inference methods are implemented. The two methods investigated are fuzzy c-means with minimum description length inference and k-medoids with BIC. These approaches lend themselves to large scale parallel processing. To address the computational demands, the Nvidia CUDA framework and Tesla architecture are utilized. The resulting performance demonstrated 1-2 orders of magnitude improvement over an equivalent sequential version. The quality of results is promising and motivates further research and development in this direction.