Fine-grain parallel megabase sequence comparison with multiple heterogeneous GPUs

Abstract

This paper proposes and evaluates a parallel strategy to execute the exact Smith-Waterman (SW) algorithm for megabase DNA sequences in heterogeneous multi-GPU platforms. In our strategy, the computation of a single huge SW matrix is spread over multiple GPUs, which communicate border elements to the neighbour, using a circular buffer mechanism that hides the communication overhead. We compared 4 pairs of human-chimpanzee homologous chromosomes using 2 different GPU environments, obtaining a performance of up to 140.36 GCUPS (Billion of cells processed per second) with 3 heterogeneous GPUS.