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 ($\underline{\text{s}}\text{imulating}$ $\underline{\text{P}}\text{henotypic}$ $\underline{\text{E}}\text{volution}$ on $\underline{\text{G}}\text{eneral Purpose}$ $\underline{\text{G}}\text{raphics Processing Units}$ (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.