A GPU-accelerated compute framework for pathogen genomic variant identification to aid genomic epidemiology of infectious disease: a malaria case study

As recently demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale pathogen genomic data are crucial to characterize transmission patterns of human infectious diseases. Yet, current methods to process raw sequence data into analysis-ready variants remain slow to scale, hampering rapid surveillance efforts and epidemiological investigations for disease control. Here, we introduce an accelerated, scalable, reproducible, and cost-effective framework for pathogen genomic variant identification and present an evaluation of its performance and accuracy across benchmark datasets of Plasmodium falciparum malaria genomes. We demonstrate superior performance of the GPU framework relative to standard pipelines with mean execution time and computational costs reduced by 27x and 4.6x, respectively, while delivering 99.9% accuracy at enhanced reproducibility.