HAMSA: Highly Accelerated Multiple Sequence Aligner

For biologists, the existence of an efficient tool for multiple sequence alignment is essential. This work presents a new parallel aligner called HAMSA. HAMSA is a bioinformatics application designed for highly accelerated alignment of multiple sequences of proteins and DNA/RNA on a multi-core cluster system. The design of HAMSA is based on a combination of our new optimized algorithms proposed recently of vectorization, partitioning, and scheduling. It mainly operates on a distance vector instead of a distance matrix. It accomplishes similarity computations and generates the guide tree in a highly accelerated and accurate manner. HAMSA outperforms MSAProbs with 21.9- fold speedup, and ClustalW-MPI of 11-fold speedup. It can be considered as an essential tool for structure prediction, protein classification, motive finding and drug design studies