EasyParallel: A GUI platform for parallelization of STRUCTURE and NEWHYBRIDS analyses

PLoS One. 2020 Apr 24;15(4):e0232110. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232110. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

The software programs STRUCTURE and NEWHYBRIDS are widely used population genetic programs useful in addressing questions related to genetic structure, admixture, and hybridization. These programs usually require a large number of independent runs with many iterations to provide robust data for downstream analyses, thus significantly increasing computation time. Programs such as Structure_threader and parallelnewhybrid were previously developed to address this problem by processing tasks in parallel on a multi-threaded processor; however some programming knowledge (e.g., R, Bash) is required to run these programs. We developed EasyParallel as a community resource to facilitate practical and routine population structure and hybridization analyses. The multi-threaded parallelization of EasyParallel allows processing of large genetic datasets in a very efficient way, with its point-and-click GUI providing ready access to users who have little experience in script programming. Performance evaluation of EasyParallel using simulated datasets showed similar speed-up and parallel execution time when compared to Structure_threader and Parallelnewhybrid. EasyParallel is written in Python 3 and freely available on the GitHub site https://github.com/hzz0024/EasyParallel.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Genetics, Population / methods*
  • Humans
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA / methods*
  • Software
  • User-Computer Interface

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.