“Using the parallelized version of Meraculous, we can now assemble the entire human genome in about eight minutes using 15,360 computer processor cores. With this tool, we estimate that the output from the world’s biomedical sequencing capacity could be assembled using just a portion of NERSC’s Edison supercomputer,” says Evangelos Georganas, a UC Berkeley graduate student who led the effort to parallelize Meraculous.
Our genome assembly tool Meraculous has been useful for whole-genome assemblies. Earlier this year, Meraculous proved useful in assembling the genomes of complex plants. Now, in developing a parallelized version of Meraculous – splitting up tasks once executed one-by-one and modifying or rewriting the code to run on the many nodes (processor clusters) of a supercomputer all at once – researchers have significantly improved the time required to assemble genomes. Read the full story involving a collaboration between our researchers, and researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley here.