CARAT-GxG: CUDA-Accelerated Regression Analysis Toolkit for Large-Scale Gene-Gene Interaction with GPU Computing...

In genome-wide association studies (GWAS), regression analysis has been most commonly used to establish an association between a phenotype and genetic variants, such as single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). However, most applications of regression analysis have been restricted to the investigation of single marker because of the large computational burden. Thus, there have been limited applications of regression analysis to multiple SNPs, including gene-gene interaction (GGI) in large-scale GWAS data. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose CARAT-GxG, a GPU computing system-oriented toolkit, for performing regression analysis with GGI using CUDA (compute unified device architecture). Compared to other methods, CARAT-GxG achieved almost 700-fold execution speed and delivered highly reliable results through our GPU-specific optimization techniques. In addition, it was possible to achieve almost-linear speed acceleration with the application of a GPU computing system, which is implemented by the TORQUE Resource Manager. We expect that CARAT-GxG will enable large-scale regression analysis with GGI for GWAS data.