Bayesian Phylogenetic Diagnostics (BPD): Tools and Analyses for the Diagnosis of Convergence in Bayesian Inference of Phylogeny

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Florida State University has received an award to develop software to conduct phylogenetic analysis. Phylogenetic software helps researchers to understand the evolutionary relationship among species. Phylogeny estimation forms the foundation to most modern biological studies and helps frame researchers? and policy makers? understanding of the distribution, diversity, and conservation of life on this planet. The system will integrate existing and new algorithms of convergence and help researchers analyze and visualize phylogenies. The convergence study and software will be developed over modern high performance computing platforms. The team will take a two-tiered approach, i.e., prototype analyses and software on local computing resources and then scale up to large national computing resources, such as, TeraGrid. It is critical to demonstrate this approach now if members of the life sciences community are to effectively utilize the petascale computing resources being brought on-line in the next three years. The Bayesian Phylogenetics Diagnostics package will be available as a downloadable application, as a web application, as a web service and will be integrated with other services such as the TeraGrid, CIPRES and iPlant. This package will integrate in real-time with phylogenetic packages to give users direct insight into potential problems with the analysis. A large number of input and output formats will allow the package to exchange data with additional phylogenetic packages, statistical analysis and visualization software. Additional information about the project can be found at http://ceb.sc.fsu.edu/bpd.