A data parallel strategy for aligning multiple biological sequences on multi-core computers

In this paper, we address the large-scale biological sequence alignment problem, which has an increasing demand in computational biology. We employ data parallelism paradigm that is suitable for handling large-scale processing on multi-core computers to achieve a high degree of parallelism. Using the data parallelism paradigm, we propose a general strategy which can be used to speed up any multiple sequence alignment method. We applied five different clustering algorithms in our strategy and implemented rigorous tests on an 8-core computer using four traditional benchmarks and artificially generated sequences. The results show that our multi-core-based implementations can achieve up to 151-fold improvements in execution time while losing 2.19% accuracy on average. The source code of the proposed strategy, together with the test sets used in our analysis, is available on request.