Porting and Benchmarking of BWAKIT Pipeline on OpenPOWER Architecture

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology produces large volumes of genome data, which gets processed using various open source bioinformatics tools. The configuration and compilation of some bioinformatics tools (e.g. BWAKIT, root) is a challenging activity in its own right, not to mention the need to perform more elaborate porting activities for these applications on some architectures (e.g. IBM Power). The best practices of application porting should ensure (i) the semantics of the program or algorithm should not be changed, (ii) the output generated from the original source code and the modified source code (i.e., after porting) should be same even though the code is ported into different architectures and (iii) the output should be similar across different architectures after porting. Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) is the most popular genome mapping application used in the BWAKIT toolset. This BWAKIT provides pre-compiled binaries for x86_64 architecture and an end-to-end solution for genome mapping. In this paper, we show how to port various pre-built application binaries used in BWAKIT into OpenPOWER architecture and execute the BWAKIT pipeline successfully. Additionally, we demonstrate the validity of output results on OpenPOWER as well as present benchmarking results of BWAKIT applications that indicate the suitability of the highly multithreaded OpenPOWER architecture to execute these applications.