BEAGLE: an application programming interface and high-performance computing library for statistical phylogenetics - PubMed (original) (raw)
doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syr100. Epub 2011 Oct 1.
Aaron Darling, Derrick J Zwickl, Peter Beerli, Mark T Holder, Paul O Lewis, John P Huelsenbeck, Fredrik Ronquist, David L Swofford, Michael P Cummings, Andrew Rambaut, Marc A Suchard
Affiliations
- PMID: 21963610
- PMCID: PMC3243739
- DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syr100
BEAGLE: an application programming interface and high-performance computing library for statistical phylogenetics
Daniel L Ayres et al. Syst Biol. 2012 Jan.
Abstract
Phylogenetic inference is fundamental to our understanding of most aspects of the origin and evolution of life, and in recent years, there has been a concentration of interest in statistical approaches such as Bayesian inference and maximum likelihood estimation. Yet, for large data sets and realistic or interesting models of evolution, these approaches remain computationally demanding. High-throughput sequencing can yield data for thousands of taxa, but scaling to such problems using serial computing often necessitates the use of nonstatistical or approximate approaches. The recent emergence of graphics processing units (GPUs) provides an opportunity to leverage their excellent floating-point computational performance to accelerate statistical phylogenetic inference. A specialized library for phylogenetic calculation would allow existing software packages to make more effective use of available computer hardware, including GPUs. Adoption of a common library would also make it easier for other emerging computing architectures, such as field programmable gate arrays, to be used in the future. We present BEAGLE, an application programming interface (API) and library for high-performance statistical phylogenetic inference. The API provides a uniform interface for performing phylogenetic likelihood calculations on a variety of compute hardware platforms. The library includes a set of efficient implementations and can currently exploit hardware including GPUs using NVIDIA CUDA, central processing units (CPUs) with Streaming SIMD Extensions and related processor supplementary instruction sets, and multicore CPUs via OpenMP. To demonstrate the advantages of a common API, we have incorporated the library into several popular phylogenetic software packages. The BEAGLE library is free open source software licensed under the Lesser GPL and available from http://beagle-lib.googlecode.com. An example client program is available as public domain software.
Figures
FIGURE 1.
Performance using the BEAGLE library relative to the native sequential CPU implementations of phylogenetic analysis programs GARLI, MrBayes, and BEAST. Speedup factors are on a log scale.
References
- Felsenstein J. Evolutionary trees from DNA sequences: a maximum likelihood approach. J. Mol. Evol. 1981;17:368–376. - PubMed
- Regier J, Shultz J, Zwick A, Hussey A, Ball B, Wetzer R, Martin J, Cunningham C. Arthropod relationships revealed by phylogenomic analysis of nuclear protein-coding sequences. Nature. 2010;463:1079–1083. - PubMed
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- R01-GM078985/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/United States
- R01 GM086887/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/United States
- R01 GM037841/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/United States
- 095831/Wellcome Trust/United Kingdom
- R01-HG006139/HG/NHGRI NIH HHS/United States
- R01-GM037841/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/United States
- R01-GM086887/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/United States
- R01-NS063897/NS/NINDS NIH HHS/United States
- WT092807MA/WT_/Wellcome Trust/United Kingdom
- BB/H011285/1/BB_/Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council/United Kingdom
- R01 HG006139/HG/NHGRI NIH HHS/United States
- R01 GM069801/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/United States