Parallel and Scalable Precise Clustering

This paper describes a new technique for parallelizing protein clustering, an important bioinformatics computation for the analysis of protein sequences. Protein clustering identifies groups of proteins that are similar because they share long sequences of similar amino acids. Given a collection of protein sequences, clustering can significantly reduce the computational effort required to identify all similar sequences by avoiding many negative comparisons. The challenge, however, is to build a clustering that misses as few similar sequences (or elements, more generally) as possible.