Swarm v3: towards tera-scale amplicon clustering

Abstract

Motivation

Previously we presented swarm, an open-source amplicon clustering programme that produces fine-scale molecular operational taxonomic units (OTUs) that are free of arbitrary global clustering thresholds. Here, we present swarm v3 to address issues of contemporary datasets that are growing towards tera-byte sizes. Results

When compared with previous swarm versions, swarm v3 has modernized C++ source code, reduced memory footprint by up to 50%, optimized CPU-usage and multithreading (more than 7 times faster with default parameters), and it has been extensively tested for its robustness and logic. Availability and implementation

Source code and binaries are available at https://github.com/torognes/swarm. Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.