Array-based Data Management for Genomics

With the huge growth of genomic data, exposing multiple heterogeneous features of genomic regions for millions of individuals, we increasingly need to support domain-specific query languages and knowledge extraction operations, capable of aggregating and comparing trillions of regions arbitrarily positioned on the human genome. While row-based models for regions can be effectively used as a basis for cloud-based implementations, in previous work we have shown that the array-based model is effective in supporting the class of region-preserving operations, i.e. operations which do not create any new region but rather compose existing ones. In this paper, we remove the above constraint, and describe an array-based implementation which applies to unrestricted region operations, as required by the Genometric Query Language. Specifically, we define a wide spectrum of operations over datasets which are represented using arrays, and we show that the arraybased implementation scales well upon Spark, also thanks to a data representation which is effectively used for supporting machine learning. Our benchmark, which uses an independent, pre-existing collection of queries, shows that in many cases the novel array-based implementation significantly improves the performance of the row-based implementation.