Efficient Acceleration of the Pair-HMMs Forward Algorithm for GATK HaplotypeCaller on Graphics Processing Units

Shanshan Ren, Koen Bertels, Zaid Al-Ars

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)
51 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

GATK HaplotypeCaller (HC) is a popular variant caller, which is widely used to identify variants in complex genomes. However, due to its high variants detection accuracy, it suffers from long execution time. In GATK HC, the pair-HMMs forward algorithm accounts for a large percentage of the total execution time. This article proposes to accelerate the pair-HMMs forward algorithm on graphics processing units (GPUs) to improve the performance of GATK HC. This article presents several GPU-based implementations of the pair-HMMs forward algorithm. It also analyzes the performance bottlenecks of the implementations on an NVIDIA Tesla K40 card with various data sets. Based on these results and the characteristics of GATK HC, we are able to identify the GPU-based implementations with the highest performance for the various analyzed data sets. Experimental results show that the GPU-based implementations of the pair-HMMs forward algorithm achieve a speedup of up to 5.47× over existing GPU-based implementations.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-12
Number of pages12
JournalEvolutionary Bioinformatics
Volume14
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • Pair-HMMs forward algorithm
  • GPU acceleration
  • memory access
  • GATK HaplotypeCaller

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