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BackgroundThe development of next-generation sequencing instruments has led to the generation of millions of short sequences in a single run. The process of aligning these reads to a reference genome is time consuming and demands the development of fast and accurate alignment tools. However, the current proposed tools make different compromises between the accuracy and the speed of mapping. Moreover, many important aspects are overlooked while comparing the performance of a newly developed tool to the state of the art. Therefore, there is a need for an objective evaluation method that covers all the aspects. In this work, we introduce a benchmarking suite to extensively analyze sequencing tools with respect to various aspects and provide an objective comparison.ResultsWe applied our benchmarking tests on 9 well known mapping tools, namely, Bowtie, Bowtie2, BWA, SOAP2, MAQ, RMAP, GSNAP, Novoalign, and mrsFAST (mrFAST) using synthetic data and real RNA-Seq data. MAQ and RMAP are based on building hash tables for the reads, whereas the remaining tools are based on indexing the reference genome. The benchmarking tests reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. The results show that no single tool outperforms all others in all metrics. However, Bowtie maintained the best throughput for most of the tests while BWA performed better for longer read lengths. The benchmarking tests are not restricted to the mentioned tools and can be further applied to others.ConclusionThe mapping process is still a hard problem that is affected by many factors. In this work, we provided a benchmarking suite that reveals and evaluates the different factors affecting the mapping process. Still, there is no tool that outperforms all of the others in all the tests. Therefore, the end user should clearly specify his needs in order to choose the tool that provides the best results.

Adaptive scientific computations require that periodic repartitioning (load balancing) occur dynamically to maintain load balance. Hypergraph partitioning is a successful model for minimizing communication volume in scientific computations, and partitioning software for the static case is widely available. In this paper, we present a new hypergraph model for the dynamic case, where we minimize the sum of communication in the application plus the migration cost to move data, thereby reducing total execution time. The new model can be solved using hypergraph partitioning with fixed vertices. We describe an implementation of a parallel multilevel repartitioning algorithm within the Zoltan load-balancing toolkit, which to our knowledge is the first code for dynamic load balancing based on hypergraph partitioning. Finally, we present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a Linux cluster with up to 64 processors. Our new algorithm compares favorably to the widely used ParMETIS partitioning software in terms of quality, and would have reduced total execution time in most of our test cases. * Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin

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