Started in 2009, the aim of the BarraCUDA project is to develop a sequence mapping software that utilizes the massive parallelism of graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the inexact alignment of short sequence reads to a particular location on a reference genome.

BarraCUDA can align a paired-end library containing 14 million pairs of 76bp reads to the Human genome in about 20 minutes using a £380 NVIDIA Geforce GTX 580. The alignment throughput can be boosted further by using multiple GPUs at the same time.

Being based on BWA (http://bio-bwa.sf.net) from the Sanger Institute, BarraCUDA delivers a high level of alignment fidelity and is comparable to other mainstream alignment programs. It can perform gapped alignment with gap extensions, in order to minimise the number of false variant calls in re-sequencing studies.