CUDA-Sankoff: Using GPU to Accelerate the Pairwise Structural RNA Alignment

In this paper, we propose and evaluate CUDASankoff, a solution to the RNA structural alignment problem based on the Sankoff algorithm in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). To our knowledge, this is the first time the Sankoff algorithm is implemented in GPU. In our solution, we show how to linearize the Sankoff 4-dimensional dynamic programming (4D DP) matrix and we propose a two-level wavefront approach to exploit the parallelism. The results were obtained with two different NVidia GPUs, comparing sets of real RNA sequences with lengths from 46 to 281 nucleotides. We show that our GPU approach is up to 24 times faster than a 16-core CPU solution in the 281 nucleotide Sankoff execution.