Developer(s) | Nvidia |
---|---|
Stable release | 4.3.1-1 / July 1, 2024 |
Platform | Nvidia GPUs |
Available in | English |
Type | Medical software |
Website | www |
Nvidia Parabricks is a suite of free software for genome analysis developed by Nvidia, designed to deliver high throughput by using graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration. [1]
Parabricks offers workflows for DNA and RNA analyses and the detection of germline and somatic mutations, using open-source tools. [1] It is designed to improve the computing time of genomic data analysis while maintaining the flexibility required for various bioinformatics experiments. [1] Along with the speed of GPU-based processing, Parabricks ensures high accuracy, compliance with standard genomic formats and the ability to scale in order to handle very large datasets. [1]
Users can download and run Parabricks pipelines locally or directly deploy them on cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Microsoft Azure. [1]
The massive reduction in sequencing costs [2] resulted in a significant increase in the size and the availability of genomics data [3] with the potential of revolutionizing many fields, from medicine to drug design. [4]
Starting from a biological sample (e.g., saliva or blood), it is possible to extract the individual's DNA and sequence it with sequencing machinery to translate the biological information into a textual sequence of bases. [5] Then, once the entire genome is obtained through the genome assembly process, the DNA can be analyzed to extract information that is key in several domains, including personalized medicine and medical diagnostics. [6]
Typically, genomics data analysis is performed with tools based on Central Processing Units (CPUs) for processing. [7] Recently, several researchers in this field have underlined the challenges in terms of computing power delivered by these tools and focused their efforts on finding ways to boost the performance of the applications. [7] The issue has been addressed in two ways: developing more efficient algorithms or accelerating the compute-intensive part using hardware accelerators. Examples of accelerators used in the domain are GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs [8]
In this context, GPUs have revolutionized genomics by exploiting their parallel processing power to accelerate computationally intensive tasks. [9] [10] GPUs deliver promising results in these scenarios thanks to their architecture, composed of thousands of small cores capable of performing computations in parallel. [11] This parallelism allows GPUs to process multiple tasks simultaneously, significantly speeding up computations that can be broken down into independent units. [11] For instance, aligning millions of sequencing reads against a reference genome or performing statistical analyses on large genomic datasets can be completed much faster on GPUs than when using CPUs. [10] This facilitates the rapid analysis of genomic data from diverse sources, ranging from individual genomes to large-scale population studies, [12] accelerating the understanding of genetic diseases, genetic diversity, and more complex biological systems. [10]
Parabricks offers end users various collections of tools organized sequentially to analyze the raw data according to the user's requirements, called pipelines. [1] Nevertheless, users can decide to run the tools provided by Parabricks as a standalone, still exploiting GPU acceleration to overcome possible computational bottlenecks. Only some of the provided tools in the suite are GPU-based. [13]
Overall, all the pipelines share a standard structure. Most of the pipelines are built to analyze FASTQ data resulting from various sequencing technologies (e.g., short- or long-read). Input genomic sequences are firstly aligned and then undergo a quality control process. These two processes provide a BAM or a CRAM file as an intermediate result. Based on this data, the variant calling task that follows employs high-accuracy tools that are already widely used. As output, these pipelines provide the identified mutations in a VCF (or a gVCF). [13]
The germline pipeline offered by Parabricks follows the best practices [14] proposed by the Broad Institute in their Genome Analysis ToolKit (GATK). [15] The germline pipeline operates on the FASTQ files provided as input by the user to call the variants that, belonging to the germ line, can be inherited. [13]
This pipeline analyzes data computing the read alignment with BWA-MEM [16] [17] and calling variants using GATK HaplotypeCaller, [18] one of the most relevant tools in the domain for germline variant calling. [13]
Besides the pipeline that resorts to HaplotypeCaller to call variants, Parabricks also offers an alternative pipeline that still calls germline variants but is based on DeepVariant. [19] [20] DeepVariant is a variant caller, developed and maintained by Google, capable of identifying mutations using a deep learning-based approach. The core of DeepVariant [19] is a convolutional neural network (CNN) that identifies variants by transforming this task into an image classification operation. In Parabricks, the inference process is accelerated in hardware. For this pipeline, only T4, V100, and A100 GPUs are supported. [13]
Analyses performed according to this pipeline are compliant with the use of BWA-MEM [16] for the alignment by Google's CNN for variant calling. [13]
Still compliant with GATK best practices, [14] the human_par pipeline allows users to identify mutations in the entire human genome, including sex chromosomes X and Y, and, thus, it is compliant with their ploidy. For male samples, firstly, the pipeline runs HaplotypeCaller [18] on all the regions that do not belong to the X and Y chromosomes and on the pseudoautosomal region with ploidy equal to 1. Then, HaplotypeCaller analyses the X and Y regions without the pseudoautosomal region with ploidy 2. Regarding female samples, instead, the pipeline runs HaplotypeCaller on the entire genome, with ploidy 2. [13]
The sex of the sample can be determined in two main ways:
--sample-sex
option;--range-male
and --range-female
and let the tool automatically infer the sex of the samples based on the X and Y reads count.The pipeline requires the user to specify at least one of these three options. [13]
As for the germline case, since this pipeline targets the germline variants, the pipeline resorts to BWA-MEM [16] for the alignment, followed by HaplotypeCaller [18] for variant calling. [13]
Parabricks' somatic pipeline is designed to call somatic variants, i.e., those mutations affecting non-reproductive (somatic) cells. This pipeline can analyze both tumor and non-tumor genomes, offering either tumor-only or tumor/normal analyses for comprehensive examinations. [13]
As in the germline pipeline, the alignment task is carried out using BWA-MEM [16] followed by GATK Mutect [21] to identify the possible mutations. Mutect is used instead of HaplotypeCaller due to its focus on somatic mutations, as opposed to germline mutations targeted by HaplotypeCaller. [21]
This pipeline is optimized for short variant discovery (i.e., Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and indels) in RNAseq data. It follows the Broad Institute's best practices for these types of analyses. [13]
It relies on the STAR aligner, [22] a read aligner specialized for RNA sequences for aligning the reads, and HaplotypeCaller [18] for calling variants. [13]
Parabricks provides a collection of tools to perform genomics analyses, classified into six main categories related to their task. [13] These tools combined constitutes Parabricks' pipelines, and can be also used as-is.
For FASTQ and BAM files processing, the proposed tools are: [13]
For calling variants, the proposed tools are: [13]
For RNA processing, the proposed tools are: [13]
For results quality control, the proposed tools are: [13]
For processing variants, the proposed tools are: [13]
For processing gVCF files, the proposed tools are: [13]
Not all the listed tools are accelerated on GPU. [13]
Users can download and run Parabricks pipelines on their local servers, allowing for private, on-site data processing and analysis. They also can deploy Parabricks pipelines on cloud platforms, with improved scalability for larger datasets. Supported cloud providers include AWS, GCP, OCI, and Azure. [1]
In the latest release (v4.3.1-1), Parabricks includes support for the NVIDIA Grace Hopper super chip. [23] The NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip is a heterogeneous platform designed for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, combining an NVIDIA Grace and a Hopper on a single chip. [24] This platform enhances application performance using both GPUs and CPUs, offering a programming model aimed at improving performance, portability, and productivity. [23]
Due to the computational power required by genomics workloads, Parabricks has found application in several research studies with different applicative domains, especially in cancer research. [25] [26] [27]
Scientists from Washington University used the Parabricks DeepVariant pipeline for identifying variants (e.g., SNPs and small indels) in long-read Hi-Fi whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data generated with PacBio's Revio SMRT Cell technology. [28]
In addition to the pipelines, individual components of Parabricks have been used as standalone tools in academic settings. For example, the accelerated DeepVariant has been employed in a novel process to reduce the processing time further for WGS Nanopore data. [29]
In 2022, Nvidia announced a collaboration with the Broad Institute to provide researchers with the benefits of accelerated computing. This partnership includes the entire suite of Nvidia's biomedical hardware-accelerated software suite called Clara, that includes Parabricks and MONAI. [30] Similarly, the Regeneron Genetics Center uses Parabricks to expedite the secondary analysis of the exomes they sequence in their high-throughput sequencing center, leverage the DeepVariant Germline pipeline inside their workflows. [31]
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The process of analyzing and interpreting data can sometimes be referred to as computational biology, however this distinction between the two terms is often disputed. To some, the term computational biology refers to building and using models of biological systems.
In bioinformatics, sequence analysis is the process of subjecting a DNA, RNA or peptide sequence to any of a wide range of analytical methods to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution. It can be performed on the entire genome, transcriptome or proteome of an organism, and can also involve only selected segments or regions, like tandem repeats and transposable elements. Methodologies used include sequence alignment, searches against biological databases, and others.
In genetics and bioinformatics, a single-nucleotide polymorphism is a germline substitution of a single nucleotide at a specific position in the genome. Although certain definitions require the substitution to be present in a sufficiently large fraction of the population, many publications do not apply such a frequency threshold.
A DNA segment is identical by state (IBS) in two or more individuals if they have identical nucleotide sequences in this segment. An IBS segment is identical by descent (IBD) in two or more individuals if they have inherited it from a common ancestor without recombination, that is, the segment has the same ancestral origin in these individuals. DNA segments that are IBD are IBS per definition, but segments that are not IBD can still be IBS due to the same mutations in different individuals or recombinations that do not alter the segment.
Computational genomics refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis to decipher biology from genome sequences and related data, including both DNA and RNA sequence as well as other "post-genomic" data. These, in combination with computational and statistical approaches to understanding the function of the genes and statistical association analysis, this field is also often referred to as Computational and Statistical Genetics/genomics. As such, computational genomics may be regarded as a subset of bioinformatics and computational biology, but with a focus on using whole genomes to understand the principles of how the DNA of a species controls its biology at the molecular level and beyond. With the current abundance of massive biological datasets, computational studies have become one of the most important means to biological discovery.
Perfect phylogeny is a term used in computational phylogenetics to denote a phylogenetic tree in which all internal nodes may be labeled such that all characters evolve down the tree without homoplasy. That is, characteristics do not hold to evolutionary convergence, and do not have analogous structures. Statistically, this can be represented as an ancestor having state "0" in all characteristics where 0 represents a lack of that characteristic. Each of these characteristics changes from 0 to 1 exactly once and never reverts to state 0. It is rare that actual data adheres to the concept of perfect phylogeny.
Computational epigenetics uses statistical methods and mathematical modelling in epigenetic research. Due to the recent explosion of epigenome datasets, computational methods play an increasing role in all areas of epigenetic research.
Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is the process of determining the entirety, or nearly the entirety, of the DNA sequence of an organism's genome at a single time. This entails sequencing all of an organism's chromosomal DNA as well as DNA contained in the mitochondria and, for plants, in the chloroplast.
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Cancer genome sequencing is the whole genome sequencing of a single, homogeneous or heterogeneous group of cancer cells. It is a biochemical laboratory method for the characterization and identification of the DNA or RNA sequences of cancer cell(s).
SNV calling from NGS data is any of a range of methods for identifying the existence of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) from the results of next generation sequencing (NGS) experiments. These are computational techniques, and are in contrast to special experimental methods based on known population-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms. Due to the increasing abundance of NGS data, these techniques are becoming increasingly popular for performing SNP genotyping, with a wide variety of algorithms designed for specific experimental designs and applications. In addition to the usual application domain of SNP genotyping, these techniques have been successfully adapted to identify rare SNPs within a population, as well as detecting somatic SNVs within an individual using multiple tissue samples.
Single nucleotide polymorphism annotation is the process of predicting the effect or function of an individual SNP using SNP annotation tools. In SNP annotation the biological information is extracted, collected and displayed in a clear form amenable to query. SNP functional annotation is typically performed based on the available information on nucleic acid and protein sequences.
Single-cell DNA template strand sequencing, or Strand-seq, is a technique for the selective sequencing of a daughter cell's parental template strands. This technique offers a wide variety of applications, including the identification of sister chromatid exchanges in the parental cell prior to segregation, the assessment of non-random segregation of sister chromatids, the identification of misoriented contigs in genome assemblies, de novo genome assembly of both haplotypes in diploid organisms including humans, whole-chromosome haplotyping, and the identification of germline and somatic genomic structural variation, the latter of which can be detected robustly even in single cells.
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