The Phylogenetic Likelihood Library

The Phylogenetic Likelihood Library

Abstract

We introduce the Phylogenetic Likelihood Library (PLL), a highly optimized application programming interface for developing likelihood-based phylogenetic inference and postanalysis software. The PLL implements appropriate data structures and functions that allow users to quickly implement common, error-prone, and labor-intensive tasks, such as likelihood calculations, model parameter as well as branch length optimization, and tree space exploration. The highly optimized and parallelized implementation of the phylogenetic likelihood function and a thorough documentation provide a framework for rapid development of scalable parallel phylogenetic software. By example of two likelihood-based phylogenetic codes we show that the PLL improves the sequential performance of current software by a factor of 2–10 while requiring only 1 month of programming time for integration. We show that, when numerical scaling for preventing floating point underflow is enabled, the double precision likelihood calculations in the PLL are up to 1.9 times faster than those in BEAGLE. On an empirical DNA dataset with 2000 taxa the AVX version of PLL is 4 times faster than BEAGLE (scaling enabled and required). The PLL is available at http://www.libpll.org under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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Authors
  • von Haeseler, Arndt
  • Bui, Minh Q.
  • Nguyen, Lam Tung
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Shortfacts
Category
Journal Paper
Divisions
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Subjects
Informatik Sonstiges
Journal or Publication Title
Oxford Journals
ISSN
1076-836X
Publisher
Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Page Range
pp. 356-362
Number
2
Volume
64
Date
October 2014
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