SparkBWA: Speeding Up the Alignment of High-Throughput DNA Sequencing Data.Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have led to a huge amount of genomic data that need to be analyzed and interpreted.  In this work we introduce SparkBWA, a new tool that exploits the capabilities of a big data technology as Spark to boost the performance of one of the most widely adopted aligner, the Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA).  The design of SparkBWA uses two independent software layers in such a way that no modifications to the original BWA source code are required, which assures its compatibility with any BWA version (future or legacy).  SparkBWA is evaluated in different scenarios showing noticeable results in terms of performance and scalability.  The source code of the software described in this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/citiususc/SparkBWA, with a GPL3 license.
SparkBWA