Abstract
General-purpose processors can now contain many dozens of processor cores and support hundreds of simultaneous threads of execution. To make best use of these threads, genomics software must contend with new and subtle computer architecture issues. We discuss some of these and propose methods for improving thread scaling in tools that analyze each read independently, such as read aligners. We implement these methods in new versions of Bowtie, Bowtie 2 and HISAT. We greatly improve thread scaling in many scenarios, including on the recent Intel Xeon Phi architecture. We also highlight how bottlenecks are exacerbated by variable-record-length file formats like FASTQ and suggest changes that enable superior scaling.
Copyright
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.