Scaling variant detection pipelines for whole genome sequencing analysis

Scaling for whole genome sequencing

Moving from exome to whole genome sequencing introduces a myriad of scaling and informatics challenges. In addition to the biological component of correctly identifying biological variation, it’s equally important to be able to handle the informatics complexities that come with scaling up to whole genomes.

At Harvard School of Public Health, we are processing an increasing number of whole genome samples and the goal of this post is to share experiences scaling the bcbio-nextgen pipeline to handle the associated increase in file sizes and computational requirements. We’ll provide an overview of the pipeline architecture in bcbio-nextgen and detail the four areas we found most useful to overcome processing bottlenecks:

• Support heterogeneous cluster creation to maximize resource usage.
• Increase parallelism by developing flexible methods to split and process by genomic regions.
• Avoid file IO and prefer streaming piped processing pipelines.
• Explore distributed file systems to better handle file IO.

This overview isn’t meant as a prescription, but rather as a description of experiences so far. The work is a collaboration between the HSPH Bioinformatics Core, the research computing team at Harvard FAS and Dell Research. We welcome suggestions and thoughts from others working on these problems.

Pipeline architecture

The bcbio-nextgen pipeline runs in parallel on single multicore machines or distributed on job scheduler managed clusters like LSF, SGE, and TORQUE. The IPython parallel framework manages the set up of parallel engines and handling communication between them. These abstractions allow the same pipeline to scale from a single processor to hundreds of node on a cluster.

The high level diagram of the analysis pipeline shows the major steps in the process. For whole genome samples we start with large 100Gb+ files of reads in FASTQ or BAM format and perform alignment, post-alignment processing, variant calling and variant post processing. These steps involve numerous externally developed software tools with different processing and memory requirements.

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