Section: New Software and Platforms

PLAST

Local alignment tool

Keywords: Bioinformatics - Genomic sequence - Genomics

Functional Description

PLAST is a parallel alignment search tool for comparing large protein banks.

Sequence similarity searching is an important and challenging task in molecular biology and next-generation sequencing should further strengthen the need for faster algorithms to process such huge amount of data. At the same time, the internal architecture of current microprocessors is tending towards more parallelism, leading to the use of chips with two, four and more cores integrated on the same die. The main purpose of this work was to design an effective algorithm to fit with the parallel capabilities of modern microprocessors. A parallel algorithm for comparing large genomic banks and targeting middle-range computers has been developed and implemented in PLAST software. The algorithm exploits two key parallel features of existing and future microprocessors: the SIMD programming model (SSE instruction set) and the multithreading concept (multicore). Compared to multithreaded BLAST software, tests performed on an 8-processor server have shown speedup ranging from 3 to 6 with a similar level of accuracy.

• Participants: Dominique Lavenier, Erwan Drezen and Van Hoa Nguyen

• Contact: Dominique Lavenier

• URL: https://team.inria.fr/genscale/high-throughput-sequence-analysis/plast-intensive-sequence-comparison/