Sourmash Branchwater Enables Lightweight Petabyte-Scale Sequence Search

Irber, L. C.; Pierce-Ward, N. T.; Brown, C. T.

doi:10.1101/2022.11.02.514947

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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2022.11.02.514947

Sourmash Branchwater Enables Lightweight Petabyte-Scale Sequence Search

Irber, L. C.·Pierce-Ward, N. T.·Brown, C. T.

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Abstract

We introduce branchwater, a flexible and fast petabase-scale search for the 767,000 public metagenomes presently in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive. Our search is based on the FracMinHash k-mer sketching technique and can search all public metagenomes with 1000 query genomes in approximately 36 hours using 50 GB of RAM and 32 threads. Branchwater is a Rust-based multithreading front-end built on top of the sourmash library. We provide biological use cases, examine performance, and discuss design and performance considerations.

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Irber, L. C., Pierce-Ward, N. T., Brown, C. T.. 2022-11-03. Sourmash Branchwater Enables Lightweight Petabyte-Scale Sequence Search. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.02.514947

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