MrBayes tgMC³<bold>++</bold>: A High Performance and Resource-Efficient GPU-Oriented Phylogenetic Analysis Method

The tgMC3++ method (proposed herein) is proposed, a high performance and resource-efficient method for GPU-oriented parallelization of likelihood estimations that supports more evolutionary models and gamma categories, which previous GPU- oriented methods fail to take into analysis.

Abstract

MrBayes is a widespread phylogenetic inference tool harnessing empirical evolutionary models and Bayesian statistics. However, the computational cost on the likelihood estimation is very expensive, resulting in undesirably long execution time. Although a number of multi-threaded optimizations have been proposed to speed up MrBayes, there are bottlenecks that severely limit the GPU thread-level parallelism of likelihood estimations. This study proposes a high performance and resource-efficient method for GPU-oriented parallelization of likelihood estimations. Instead of having to rely on empirical programming, the proposed novel decomposition storage model implements high performance data transfers implicitly. In terms of performance improvement, a speedup factor of up to 178 can be achieved on the analysis of simulated datasets by four Tesla K40 cards. In comparison to the other publicly available GPU-oriented MrBayes, the tgMC3++ method (proposed herein) outperforms the tgMC3 (v1.0), nMC3 (v2.1.1) and oMC3 (v1.00) methods by speedup factors of up to 1.6, 1.9 and 2.9, respectively. Moreover, tgMC3++ supports more evolutionary models and gamma categories, which previous GPU-oriented methods fail to take into analysis.