sPEGG: high throughput eco-evolutionary simulations on commodity graphics processors

Abstract

Integrating population genetics into community ecology theory is a major goal in ecology and evolution, but analyzing the resulting models is computationally daunting. Here we describe sPEGG ($\underline{\textrm{s}}\textrm{imulating}$ $\underline{\textrm{P}}\textrm{henotypic}$ $\underline{\textrm{E}}\textrm{volution}$ on $\underline{\textrm{G}}\textrm{eneral Purpose}$ $\underline{\textrm{G}}\textrm{raphics Processing Units}$ (GPGPUs)), an open-source, multi-species forward-time population genetics simulator. Using a single commodity GPGPU instead of a single central processor, we find sPEGG can accelerate eco-evolutionary simulations by a factor of over 200, comparable to performance on a small-to-medium sized computer cluster.