MrBayes tgMC3++: A High Performance and Resource-Efficient GPU-Oriented Phylogenetic Analysis Method

IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform. 2016 Sep-Oct;13(5):845-854. doi: 10.1109/TCBB.2015.2495202. Epub 2015 Oct 27.

Abstract

MrBayes is a widespread phylogenetic inference tool harnessing empirical evolutionary models and Bayesian statistics. However, the computational cost on the likelihood estimation is very expensive, resulting in undesirably long execution time. Although a number of multi-threaded optimizations have been proposed to speed up MrBayes, there are bottlenecks that severely limit the GPU thread-level parallelism of likelihood estimations. This study proposes a high performance and resource-efficient method for GPU-oriented parallelization of likelihood estimations. Instead of having to rely on empirical programming, the proposed novel decomposition storage model implements high performance data transfers implicitly. In terms of performance improvement, a speedup factor of up to 178 can be achieved on the analysis of simulated datasets by four Tesla K40 cards. In comparison to the other publicly available GPU-oriented MrBayes, the tgMC3++ method (proposed herein) outperforms the tgMC3 (v1.0), nMC3 (v2.1.1) and oMC3 (v1.00) methods by speedup factors of up to 1.6, 1.9 and 2.9, respectively. Moreover, tgMC3++ supports more evolutionary models and gamma categories, which previous GPU-oriented methods fail to take into analysis.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Bayes Theorem
  • Computer Graphics / instrumentation*
  • Data Interpretation, Statistical*
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / methods*
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • Likelihood Functions
  • Phylogeny*
  • Software