GPUmotif: An Ultra-Fast and Energy-Efficient Motif Analysis Program Using GPU
Computational detection of TF binding patterns has become an indispensable tool in functional genomics research. With the rapid advance of new sequencing technologies, large amounts of protein-DNA interaction data have been produced. Analyzing this data can provide substantial insight into the mechanisms of transcriptional regulation. However, the massive amount of sequence data presents daunting challenges. In our previous work, we have developed a novel algorithm called Hybrid Motif Sampler (HMS) that enables more scalable and accurate motif analysis. Despite much improvement, HMS is still time-consuming due to the requirement to calculate matching probabilities position-by-position. Using the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit, we developed a graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated motif analysis program named GPUmotif. We proposed a “fragmentation” technique to hide data transfer time between memories. Performance comparison studies showed that commonly-used model-based motif scan and de novo motif finding procedures such as HMS can be dramatically accelerated when running GPUmotif on NVIDIA graphics cards. As a result, energy consumption can also be greatly reduced when running motif analysis using GPUmotif.
Authors developed a software package named GPUmotif that is capable of performing ultra-fast motif analysis. GPUmotif is written in C++ and CUDA C and works on any CUDA-enabled GPU. Our design is driven by the observation that motif scan constitutes the main portion of the HMS’s runtime. As mentioned earlier, although PSWMs provide an effective way to represent the sequence features of TF binding sites, scanning a large number of sequences using PSWM is time-consuming since a matching probability needs to be calculated for each possible start position of every sequence. Thus, we aimed to eliminate this computation bottleneck in model-based motif analysis algorithms such as HMS.
Energy consumption comparison
Although graphics cards draw additional power when active, utilizing them significantly reduces the computation time for a given task therefore leading to improved energy-efficiency. In the case of our motif scan core, the original non-GPU version draws 324 Joules (measured by a digital meter) to scan a 21 bp motif on a 16-MB sequence. The same scan draws only 12.8 Joules on GTX 260 and 7.6 Joules on GTX 480 which is an improvement by a factor of 25 and 42 times respectively. Our findings indicated that mundane bioinformatics jobs such as motif scan and discovery can benefits from the latest GPU-computing technology, achieving not only dramatic speedup in computing time, but also significant savings in energy consumption.
The GPUmotif program is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpumotif/
Pooya Zandevakili, Ming Hu and Zhaohui Qin. GPUmotif: An Ultra-Fast and Energy-Efficient Motif Analysis Program Using Graphics Processing Units. PLoS One. 2012. [doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036865] [Free PDF]
Category: Articles, Life Science, Software
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