MPI-GWAS: a supercomputing-aided permutation approach for genome-wide association studies

• Published in: Genomics & informatics Vol. 20; no. 1; p. e14
• Main Authors: Paik, Hyojung, Cho, Yongseong, Cho, Seong Beom, Kwon, Oh-Kyoung
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Korea Genome Organization 31.03.2022
• Subjects: Application Note
• ISSN: 2234-0742; 1598-866X; 2234-0742
• DOI: 10.5808/gi.22001

Permutation testing is a robust and popular approach for significance testing in genomic research that has the advantage of reducing inflated type 1 error rates; however, its compu-tational cost is notorious in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Here, we developed a supercomputing-aided approach to accelerate the permutation testing for GWAS, based on the message-passing interface (MPI) on parallel computing architecture. Our application, called MPI-GWAS, conducts MPI-based permutation testing using a parallel computing approach with our supercomputing system, Nurion (8,305 compute nodes, and 563,740 central processing units [CPUs]). For 107 permutations of one locus in MPI-GWAS, it was calculated in 600 s using 2,720 CPU cores. For 107 permutations of ~30,000–50,000 loci in over 7,000 subjects, the total elapsed time was ~4 days in the Nurion supercomputer. Thus, MPI-GWAS enables us to feasibly compute the permutation-based GWAS within a reason-able time by harnessing the power of parallel computing resources.