HSRA

HSRA is a MapReduce-based parallel tool for mapping reads from RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) experiments. RNA-seq analyses typically begin by mapping reads to a reference genome in order to determine the location from which the reads were originated, which is a very time-consuming step. This tool allows bioinformatics researchers to efficiently distribute their mapping tasks over the nodes of a cluster by combining a fast multithreaded spliced aligner (HISAT2) with Apache Hadoop, which is a distributed computing framework for scalable Big Data processing.

HSRA currently supports single-end and paired-end read alignments from FASTQ/FASTA datasets. Moreover, our tool uses the Hadoop Sequence Parser (HSP) library (link above) to efficiently read the input datasets stored on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), being able to process datasets compressed with Gzip and BZip2 codecs.