Fast Noisy Long Read Alignment with Multi-Level Parallelism

Abstract Background: The advent of Single Molecule Real-Time (SMRT) sequencing has overcome many limitations of second-generation sequencing, such as limited read lengths, PCR amplification biases. However, longer reads increase data volume exponentially and high error rates make many existing alignment tools inapplicable. Additionally, a single CPU's performance bottleneck restricts the effectiveness of alignment algorithms for SMRT sequencing. Methods: To address these challenges, we introduce ParaHAT, a parallel alignment algorithm for noisy long reads. ParaHAT utilizes vector-level, thread-level, process-level, and heterogeneous parallelism. We redesign the dynamic programming matrices layouts to eliminate data dependency in the base-level alignment, enabling effective vectorization. We further enhance computational speed through heterogeneous parallel technology and implement the algorithm for multi-node computing using MPI, overcoming the computational limits of a single node. Conclusion: Performance evaluations show that ParaHAT got a 5.39x speedup in base-level alignment, with a parallel acceleration ratio and weak scalability metric of 94.61 and 98.98% on 128 nodes, respectively.