Package: clustalw-mpi (0.15-1) [non-free]

MPI-distributed global sequence alignment with ClustalW

ClustalW is a popular tool for multiple sequence alignment. The alignment is achieved via three steps: pairwise alignment, guide-tree generation and progressive alignment. ClustalW-MPI is an MPI implementation of ClustalW. Based on version 1.82 of the original ClustalW, both the pairwise and progressive alignments are parallelized with MPI, a popular message passing programming standard. The pairwise alignments can be easily parallelized since the many alignments are time independent on each other. However the progressive alignments are essentially not parallelizable because of the time dependencies between each alignment.

Here the recursive parallelism paradigm is applied to the linear space profile-profile alignment algorithm. This approach is more time efficient on computers with distributed memory architecture. Traditional approach that relies on precomputing the profile-profile score matrix has also been implemented. Results shown the latter is indeed more appropriate for shared memory multiprocessor computer.

ClustalX is suggested for its support for local realignments, seaview is a versatile editor of alignments.

The original ClustalW/ClustalX can be found at URL: http://www.clustal.org/download/pre-2/

Tags: Field: Biology, Implemented in: C, User Interface: Command Line, Text-based Interactive, Role: Program, Scope: Utility, Purpose: Comparing, Supports Format: Plain Text