Bioinf data wrangling - trying to remember types of data - Devops in bioinf here (not a bioinformatician)

Question

[Marko]

Hello to all.

I remember few months back browsing biostars forum, I found nice explanation of two data types.

One is easily processed in parallel, like bwa-mem. The other type is complex to process in parallel.

Thing is that these "two types" were named something like "naively simple" or something like that.

Does this rings a bell?

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

people sometime use the words "embarassingly parallelizable" when referring to single read alignment as each individual sequence placement is independent of all the rest. Thus only the resources limit how many tasks you can take on at a time.

other bioinformatics tasks like variant calling or assembly are not so easy to parallelize as multiple, seemingly unrelated pieces of information may need to present at any moment, and it is difficult to predict which pieces are present at any given moment.