Engineering Papers⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Yelick, Katherine

Publications and source records attributed to Yelick, Katherine.

At least 19 records

Coassembly and binning of a twenty-year metagenomic time-series from Lake Mendota

Abstract The North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research (NTL-LTER) program has been extensively used to improve understanding of how aquatic ecosystems respond to environmental stressors, climate fluctuations, and human activities. Here, we report on the metagenomes of samples collected between 2000 and 2019 from Lake Mendota, a freshwater eutrophic lake within the NTL-LTER site. We utilized the distributed metagenome assembler MetaHipMer to coassemble over 10 terabases (Tbp) of data from 471 individual Illumina-sequenced metagenomes. A total of 95,523,664 contigs were assembled and binned to generate 1,894 non-redundant metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) with ≥50% completeness and ≤10% contamination. Phylogenomic analysis revealed that the MAGs were nearly exclusively bacterial, dominated by Pseudomonadota (Proteobacteria, N = 623) and Bacteroidota (N = 321). Nine eukaryotic MAGs were identified by eukCC with six assigned to the phylum Chlorophyta. Additionally, 6,350 high-quality viral sequences were identified by geNomad with the majority classified in the phylum Uroviricota. This expansive coassembled metagenomic dataset provides an unprecedented foundation to advance understanding of microbial communities in freshwater ecosystems and explore temporal ecosystem dynamics.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Exabiome: Advancing Microbial Science through Exascale Computing

The Exabiome project seeks to improve the understanding of microbiomes through the development of methods for accelerating metagenomic science using exascale computing. This article gives an overview of scientific impact of the three components of the project: metagenome assembly, protein family detection, and comparative analysis of metagenomes. Exabiome developed MetaHipMer, the only metagenome assembler capable of scaling to full exascale systems. MetaHipMer has enabled ground-breaking assemblies on the Frontier supercomputer, with many scientific benefits, such as the discovery of rare species and viral genomes. To investigate protein families, Exabiome developed two exascale tools, PASTIS and HipMCL. Together, these can utilize exascale resources to understand the functional diversity of billions of dark matter proteins and novel protein families. For comparative analysis, Exabiome developed kmerprof, a tool that can be used to compare huge metagenomes for many different scientific purposes, for example, grouping human microbiomes according to body location.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Terabase-Scale Coassembly of a Tropical Soil Microbiome

Petabases of reads are being produced by environmental metagenome sequencing. An essential step in analyzing these data is metagenome assembly, the computational reconstruction of genome sequences from microbial communities. “Coassembly” of metagenomic sequence data, in which multiple samples are assembled together, enables more complete detection of microbial genomes in an environment than “multiassembly,” in which samples are assembled individually.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Can the United States Maintain Its Leadership in High-Performance Computing? - A report from the ASCAC Subcommittee on American Competitiveness and Innovation to the ASCR Office

The United States (U.S.) is no longer the unambiguous leader in the vitally important field of high performance computing (HPC). Japan, the European Union (EU), and China have fielded systems that are on par with our fastest supercomputers. The supply chain for everything from semiconductors to scientific software is globally distributed. Yet our economic future and security depend critically on our ability to innovate faster than our competitors, and the speed of innovation depends increasingly on large-scale computational science and engineering and thus HPC. How should the United States respond to this challenge? This report seeks to initiate a new and potentially transformative national discussion on this vital question. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program is well-positioned to make informed, targeted decisions about where the United States should cooperate and where it should compete in the global market for scientific exploration and discovery. By setting its sights on problems critical to our nation and the world, by establishing productive new collaborations, and by making strategic investments, ASCR can restore and maintain U.S. scientific leadership in the critical areas described in this report while strengthening our research infrastructure and training a large, diverse cohort of scientists. In doing so, ASCR and its scientists will pave the way for a secure and prosperous future for America. For more than 30 years, the ASCR program has provided the HPC and networking capabilities and expertise needed to support DOE’s mission to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States. The program now faces the challenge of developing and deploying the next generation of HPC systems and technologies, as well as supporting the application of HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to a wide range of scientific and engineering research problems. Through its research and development efforts, the ASCR program must also advance the state of the art in HPC and accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and technological innovation. Fulfilling this promise will require significantly increased investments, as well as innovative policies and programs. This subcommittee is aware that we are making recommendations and calls for action at a time when federal resources are limited. We understand that a wide range of competing priorities must be balanced by the nation’s leaders and that there is a need to leverage resources in new ways and seek efficiencies in facilities and operations. However, we must not let these realities limit our imagination or silence our advocacy. The ASCR program is a key part of the U.S. research infrastructure and an important component of economic growth and U.S. competitiveness. ASCR has a responsibility to pursue its mission, including advanced scientific computing, applications of AI technologies, and the required advanced research facilities, with determination and enthusiasm. To fulfill the scientific enterprise’s responsibility to the nation, the ASCR program must not only develop and publish a clear vision with an associated list of goals, priorities, and recommendations but also demonstrate scientific leadership by consistently securing long-term funding. This will allow the program to build on its achievements to date, to realize its ambitious vision, and to make lasting contributions to the field.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Singleton Sieving: Overcoming the Memory/Speed Trade-Off in Exascale k-mer Analysis

Traditional filter data structures, such as Bloom filters, do not offer necessary features that modern high-performance data analytics applications need in order to efficiently perform complex data analysis tasks. For example, MetaHipMer, a de novo metagenome assembler, can use filters to weed out singleton k-mers and reduce memory usage by 30%-70%. However, the filter needs the ability to associate values with k-mers in order to perform the analysis in a single communication pass. Bloom filters do not support value associations and cause the application to perform an extra communication pass, thereby increasing the run time. Therefore, MetaHipMer faces a trade off between memory and speed due to the limited capabilities of traditional filters. In this paper, we overcome the memory and speed trade off in MetaHipMer by integrating a GPU-based feature-rich filter, the Two-Choice filter (TCF), in the MetaHipMer pipeline. The TCF uses key-value association to approximately store k-mers with extensions. This allows MetaHipMer to perform k-mer analysis on the GPUs in a single communication pass. Our empirical analysis shows a 50% reduction in memory usage in k-mer analysis on each node in MetaHipMer without any effect on the overall run time or assembly quality. The memory reduction in turn results in a 43% reduction in the number of nodes required to assemble datasets and enables MetaHipMer to scale to much larger datasets.

McCoy, Hunter↗

Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation: the second round of challenges

Abstract Evaluating metagenomic software is key for optimizing metagenome interpretation and focus of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI). The CAMI II challenge engaged the community to assess methods on realistic and complex datasets with long- and short-read sequences, created computationally from around 1,700 new and known genomes, as well as 600 new plasmids and viruses. Here we analyze 5,002 results by 76 program versions. Substantial improvements were seen in assembly, some due to long-read data. Related strains still were challenging for assembly and genome recovery through binning, as was assembly quality for the latter. Profilers markedly matured, with taxon profilers and binners excelling at higher bacterial ranks, but underperforming for viruses and Archaea. Clinical pathogen detection results revealed a need to improve reproducibility. Runtime and memory usage analyses identified efficient programs, including top performers with other metrics. The results identify challenges and guide researchers in selecting methods for analyses.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Accelerating large scale de novo metagenome assembly using GPUs

Metagenomic workflows involve studying uncultured microorganisms directly from the environment. These environmental samples when processed by modern sequencing machines yield large and complex datasets that exceed the capabilities of metagenomic software. The increasing sizes and complexities of datasets make a strong case for exascale-capable metagenome assemblers. However, the underlying algorithmic motifs are not well suited for GPUs. This poses a challenge since the majority of next-generation supercomputers will rely primarily on GPUs for computation. In this paper we present the first of its kind GPU-Accelerated implementation of the local assembly approach that is an integral part of a widely used large-scale metagenome assembler, MetaHipMer. Local assembly uses algorithms that induce random memory accesses and non-deterministic workloads, which make GPU offloading a challenging task. Our GPU implementation outperforms the CPU version by about 7x and boosts the performance of MetaHipMer by 42% when running on 64 Summit nodes.

Awan, Muaaz Gul↗

Parallel String Graph Construction and Transitive Reduction for De Novo Genome Assembly

One of the most computationally intensive tasks in computational biology is de novo genome assembly, the decoding of the sequence of an unknown genome from redundant and erroneous short sequences. A common assembly paradigm identifies overlapping sequences, simplifies their layout, and creates consensus. Despite many algorithms developed in the literature, the efficient assembly of large genomes is still an open problem. In this work, we introduce new distributed-memory parallel algorithms for overlap detection and layout simplification steps of de novo genome assembly, and implement them in the diBELLA 2D pipeline. Our distributed memory algorithms for both overlap detection and layout simplification are based on linear-algebra operations over semirings using 2D distributed sparse matrices. Our layout step consists of performing a transitive reduction from the overlap graph to a string graph. We provide a detailed communication analysis of the main stages of our new algorithms. diBELLA 2D achieves near linear scaling with over 80% parallel efficiency for the human genome, reducing the runtime for overlap detection by 1.2-1.3× for the human genome and 1.5-1.9× for C.elegans compared to the state-of-the-art. Our transitive reduction algorithm outperforms an existing distributed-memory implementation by 10.5-13.3× for the human genome and 18-29× for the C. elegans. Our work paves the way for efficient de novo assembly of large genomes using long reads in distributed memory.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

10 Years Later: Cloud Computing is Closing the Performance Gap

Can cloud computing infrastructures provide HPC-competitive performance for scientific applications broadly? Despite prolific related literature, this question remains open. Answers are crucial for designing future systems and democratizing high-performance computing. We present a multi-level approach to investigate the performance gap between HPC and cloud computing, isolating different variables that contribute to this gap. Our experiments are divided into (i) hardware and system microbenchmarks and (ii) user application proxies. The results show that today’s high-end cloud computing can deliver HPC-competitive performance not only for computationally intensive applications, but also for memory- and communication-intensive applications – at least at modest scales – thanks to the high-speed memory systems and interconnects and dedicated batch scheduling now available on some cloud platforms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Reducing Communication in Graph Neural Network Training

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful and flexible neural networks that use the naturally sparse connectivity information of the data. GNNs represent this connectivity as sparse matrices, which have lower arithmetic intensity and thus higher communication costs compared to dense matrices, making GNNs harder to scale to high concurrencies than convolutional or fully-connected neural networks. Here, we introduce a family of parallel algorithms for training GNNs and show that they can asymptotically reduce communication compared to previous parallel GNN training methods. We implement these algorithms, which are based on 1D, 1. 5D, 2D, and 3D sparse-dense matrix multiplication, using torch.distributed on GPU-equipped clusters. Our algorithms optimize communication across the full GNN training pipeline. We train GNNs on over a hundred GPUs on multiple datasets, including a protein network with over a billion edges.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

PersGNN: Applying Topological Data Analysis and Geometric Deep Learning to Structure-Based Protein Function Prediction

Understanding protein structure-function relationships is a key challenge in computational biology, with applications across the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. While it is known that protein structure directly impacts protein function, many functional prediction tasks use only protein sequence. In this work, we isolate protein structure to make functional annotations for proteins in the Protein Data Bank in order to study the expressiveness of different structure-based prediction schemes. We present PersGNN - an end-to-end trainable deep learning model that combines graph representation learning with topological data analysis to capture a complex set of both local and global structural features. While variations of these techniques have been successfully applied to proteins before, we demonstrate that our hybridized approach, PersGNN, outperforms either method on its own as well as a baseline neural network that learns from the same information. PersGNN achieves a 9.3% boost in area under the precision recall curve (AUPR) compared to the best individual model, as well as high F1 scores across different gene ontology categories, indicating the transferability of this approach.

Swenson, Nicolas↗

ADEPT: a domain independent sequence alignment strategy for gpu architectures

Bioinformatic workflows frequently make use of automated genome assembly and protein clustering tools. At the core of most of these tools, a significant portion of execution time is spent in determining optimal local alignment between two sequences. This task is performed with the Smith-Waterman algorithm, which is a dynamic programming based method. With the advent of modern sequencing technologies and increasing size of both genome and protein databases, a need for faster Smith-Waterman implementations has emerged. Multiple SIMD strategies for the Smith-Waterman algorithm are available for CPUs. However, with the move of HPC facilities towards accelerator based architectures, a need for an efficient GPU accelerated strategy has emerged. Existing GPU based strategies have either been optimized for a specific type of characters (Nucleotides or Amino Acids) or for only a handful of application use-cases. In this paper, we present ADEPT, a new sequence alignment strategy for GPU architectures that is domain independent, supporting alignment of sequences from both genomes and proteins. Our proposed strategy uses GPU specific optimizations that do not rely on the nature of sequence. We demonstrate the feasibility of this strategy by implementing the Smith-Waterman algorithm and comparing it to similar CPU strategies as well as the fastest known GPU methods for each domain. ADEPT’s driver enables it to scale across multiple GPUs and allows easy integration into software pipelines which utilize large scale computational systems. We have shown that the ADEPT based Smith-Waterman algorithm demonstrates a peak performance of 360 GCUPS and 497 GCUPs for protein based and DNA based datasets respectively on a single GPU node (8 GPUs) of the Cori Supercomputer. Overall ADEPT shows 10x faster performance in a node-to-node comparison against a corresponding SIMD CPU implementation. ADEPT demonstrates a performance that is either comparable or better than existing GPU strategies. We demonstrated the efficacy of ADEPT in supporting existing bionformatics software pipelines by integrating ADEPT in MetaHipMer a high-performance denovo metagenome assembler and PASTIS a high-performance protein similarity graph construction pipeline. Our results show 10% and 30% boost of performance in MetaHipMer and PASTIS respectively.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

LOGAN: High-Performance GPU-Based X-Drop Long-Read Alignment

Pairwise sequence alignment is one of the most computationally intensive kernels in genomic data analysis, accounting for more than 90% of the runtime for key bioinformatics applications. This method is particularly expensive for third-generation sequences due to the high computational cost of analyzing sequences of length between 1Kb and 1Mb. Given the quadratic overhead of exact pairwise algorithms for long alignments, the community primarily relies on approximate algorithms that search only for high-quality alignments and stop early when one is not found. In this work, we present the first GPU optimization of the popular X-drop alignment algorithm, that we named LOGAN. Results show that our high-performance multi-GPU implementation achieves up to 181.6 GCUPS and speed-ups up to 6.6× and 30.7× using 1 and 6 NVIDIA Tesla V100, respectively, over the state-of-the-art software running on two IBM Power9 processors using 168 CPU threads, with equivalent accuracy. We also demonstrate a 2.3× LOGAN speed-up versus ksw2, a state-of-art vectorized algorithm for sequence alignment implemented in minimap2, a long-read mapping software. Furthermore, to highlight the impact of our work on a real-world application, we couple LOGAN with a many-to-many long-read alignment software called BELLA, and demonstrate that our implementation improves the overall BELLA runtime by up to 10.6×. Finally, we adapt the Roofline model for LOGAN and demonstrate that our implementation is near optimal on the NVIDIA Tesla V100s.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

AI for Science: Report on the Department of Energy (DOE) Town Halls on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Science

The report documents the DOE Town Halls held during 2019 at Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and in Washington, DC. From July to October 2019, the Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Berkeley National Laboratories hosted a series of four town hall meetings attended by more than 1,000 U.S. scientists and engineers. The goal of the town hall series was to examine scientific opportunities in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and high-performance computing (HPC) in the next decade, and to capture the big ideas, grand challenges, and next steps to realizing these opportunities. In this report and in the Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory community, we use the term “AI for Science” to broadly represent the next generation of methods and scientific opportunities in computing, including the development and application of AI methods (e.g., machine learning, deep learning, statistical methods, data analytics, automated control, and related areas) to build models from data and to use these models alone or in conjunction with simulation and scalable computing to advance scientific research. The AI for Science town hall discussions focused on capturing the transformational uses of AI that employ HPC and/or data analysis, leveraging data sets from HPC simulations or instruments and user facilities, and addressing scientific challenges unique to DOE user facilities and the agency’s wide-ranging fundamental and applied science enterprise.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Exascale applications: skin in the game

As noted in Wikipedia, skin in the game refers to having ‘incurred risk by being involved in achieving a goal’, where ‘ skin is a synecdoche for the person involved, and game is the metaphor for actions on the field of play under discussion’. For exascale applications under development in the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing Project, nothing could be more apt, with the skin being exascale applications and the game being delivering comprehensive science-based computational applications that effectively exploit exascale high-performance computing technologies to provide breakthrough modelling and simulation and data science solutions. These solutions will yield high-confidence insights and answers to the most critical problems and challenges for the USA in scientific discovery, national security, energy assurance, economic competitiveness and advanced healthcare. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science’.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The parallelism motifs of genomic data analysis

Genomic datasets are growing dramatically as the cost of sequencing continues to decline and small sequencing devices become available. Enormous community databases store and share these data with the research community, but some of these genomic data analysis problems require large-scale computational platforms to meet both the memory and computational requirements. These applications differ from scientific simulations that dominate the workload on high-end parallel systems today and place different requirements on programming support, software libraries and parallel architectural design. For example, they involve irregular communication patterns such as asynchronous updates to shared data structures. We consider several problems in high-performance genomics analysis, including alignment, profiling, clustering and assembly for both single genomes and metagenomes. We identify some of the common computational patterns or ‘motifs’ that help inform parallelization strategies and compare our motifs to some of the established lists, arguing that at least two key patterns, sorting and hashing, are missing. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science’.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

RDMA vs. RPC for Implementing Distributed Data Structures

Distributed data structures are key to implementing scalable applications for scientific simulations and data analysis. In this paper we look at two implementation styles for distributed data structures: remote direct memory access (RDMA) and remote procedure call (RPC). We focus on operations that require individual accesses to remote portions of a distributed data structure, e.g., accessing a hash table bucket or distributed queue, rather than global operations in which all processors collectively exchange information. We look at the trade-offs between the two styles through microbenchmarks and a performance model that approximates the cost of each. The RDMA operations have direct hardware support in the network and therefore lower latency and overhead, while the RPC operations are more expressive but higher cost and can suffer from lack of attentiveness from the remote side. We also run experiments to compare the real-world performance of RDMA- and RPC-based data structure operations with the predicted performance to evaluate the accuracy of our model, and show that while the model does not always precisely predict running time, it allows us to choose the best implementation in the examples shown. We believe this analysis will assist developers in designing data structures that will perform well on current network architectures, as well as network architects in providing better support for this class of distributed data structures.

distributed data structures↗