Improvements to the parallel solution based on collective operations for the phylogenetic tree reconstruction bootstrap in PhyML 3.0

Abstract

Phylogenetics determines the evolutionary relationships between groups of species, through a phylogenetic tree. PhyML is among the main programs for the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees. Bootstrap is a statistical method used to measure the confidence of a given data set, which is usually applied in the analysis of inferred phylogenetic trees. In PhyML this method has two MPI parallel implementations: with point-to-point operations and collective operations. The second version is more efficient than the first, however it has a limitation on the number of bootstrap to be used due to the increase in memory consumption. In order to solve this problem, three proposals were developed. The objectives of this work were to carry out the validation of these versions together with performance tests. The validation showed that the proposed solutions present results equivalent to the point-to-point version. In the performance simulations, two solutions were shown to be superior to the point-to-point version, with the best one achieving gains of 28.46% and 39.64% for 32 and 64 processes, respectively. Therefore, the enhancements allow alternatives to the point-to-point version without limiting memory.