Development of MapReduce and MPI Programs for Motif Search

As one of the important problems in molecular biology, motif search is computationally expensive, especially when the size of DNA sequences is large. Extended from a graduate course project in parallel and distributed computing (PDC), this paper investigates two different programming frameworks, namely MapReduce and MPI on motif finding. We implemented a serial algorithm, a MapReduce based algorithm, and a MPI program to calculate the best motif in given DNA sequences. The experimental results demonstrate that our MPI program outperformed both the MapReduce-based algorithm and the serial program with superior efficiency.