Efficient pairwise statistical significance estimation for local sequence alignment using GPU

Pairwise statistical significance has been found to be quite accurate in identifying related sequences (homologs), which is a key step in numerous bioinformatics applications. However, it is computational and data intensive, particularly for a large amount of sequence data. To prevent it from becoming a performance bottleneck, we resort to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for accelerating the computation. In this paper, we present a GPU memory-access optimized implementation for a pairwise statistical significance estimation algorithm. By exploring the algorithm´s data access characteristics, we developed a tile-based scheme that can produce a contiguous memory accesses pattern to GPU global memory and sustain a large number of threads to achieve a high GPU occupancy. Our experimental results present both single- and multi-pair statistical significance estimations. The performance evaluation was carried out on an NVIDIA Telsa C2050 GPU. We observe more than 180× end-to-end speedup over the CPU implementation on an Intel© Core™ i7 processor. The proposed memory access optimizations and efficient framework are also applicable to many other sequence comparison based applications, such as DNA sequence mapping and database search.