A Parallel Tool for the Identification of Differentially Methylated Regions in Genomic Analyses

Abstract

Methylation is a chemical process that modifies DNA through the addition of a methyl group to one or several nucleotides. Discovering differentially methylated regions is an important research field in genomics, as it can help to anticipate the risk of suffering from certain diseases. RADMeth is one of the most accurate tools in this field, but it has high computational complexity. In this work, we present a hybrid MPI-OpenMP parallel implementation of RADMeth to accelerate its execution on distributed-memory systems, reaching speedups of up to 189 when running on 256 cores and allowing for its application to large-scale datasets.