Concurrency Optimization for Integrative Network Analysis

Virginia Tech\'s Computational Bioinformatics and Bio-imaging Laboratory (CBIL) is exploring integrative network analysis techniques to identify subnetworks or genetic pathways that contribute to various cancers. Chen et. al. developed a bagging Markov random field (BMRF)-based approach which examines gene expression data with prior biological information to reliably identify significant genes and proteins. Using random resampling with replacement (bootstrapping or bagging) is essential to confident results but is computationally demanding as multiple iterations of the network identification (by simulated annealing) is required. The MATLAB implementation is computationally demanding, employs limited concurrency, and thus time prohibitive. Using strong software development discipline we optimize BMRF using algorithmic, compiler, and concurrency techniques (including Nvidia GPUs) to alleviate the wall clock time needed for analysis of large-scale genomic data. Particularly, we decompose the BMRF algorithm into functional blocks, implement the algorithm in C/C++ and further explore the C/C++ implementation with concurrency optimization. Experiments are conducted with simulation and real data to demonstrate that a significant speedup of BMRF can be achieved by exploiting concurrency opportunities. We believe that the experience gained by this research shall help pave the way for us to develop computationally efficient algorithms leveraging concurrency, enabling researchers to efficiently analyze larger-scale data sets essential for furthering cancer research.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Barnes, Robert Otto II

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Xuan, Jianhua

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Kriz, Ronald D.
• Wang, Yue J.

• BMRF
• simulated annealing
• subnetwork identification
• concurrency
• parallelism

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:564

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/23220