Accelerating BWA Aligner Using Multistage Data Parallelization on Multicore and Manycore Architectures

Nowadays, rapid progress in next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies has drastically decreased the cost and time required to obtain genome sequences. A series of powerful computing accelerators, such as GPUs and Xeon Phi MIC, are becoming a common platform to reduce the computational cost of the most demanding processes when genomic data is analyzed. GPU has received more attention at literature so far. However, Xeon Phi constitutes a very attractive approach to improve performance because applications don’t need to be rewritten in a different programming language specifically oriented to it. Sequence alignment is a fundamental step in any variant analysis study and there are many tools that cope with this problem. We have selected BWA, one of the most popular sequence aligner, and studied different data management strategies to improve its execution time on hybrid systems made of multicore CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators. Our main contributions are focused on designing new strategies that combine data splitting and index replication in order to achieve a better balance in the use of system memory and reduce latency penalties. Our experimental results show significant speed-up improvements when such strategies are executed in our hybrid platform, taking advantage of the combined computing power of a standard multicore CPU and a Xeon Phi accelerator.