# How to reduce runtime of gene data processing program?

This program takes a huge data set as input, processes it, calculates and then writes the output to an array. Most calculations may be quite simple, such as summation. In the input file, there are about 100 million rows and 3 columns.

1. first column is the name of the gene (total 100 millions)
2. second column is the specific value
3. third column is another value of each gene

The problem I face is a long runtime. How can I reduce it?

I need to write all new values (from GenePair to RM_pval with header) I calculated from the new file.

fi = open ('1.txt')
fo = open ('2.txt','w')

import math
def log(x):
return math.log(x)

from math import sqrt

import sys
sys.path.append('/tools/lib/python2.7/site-packages')
import numpy
import scipy
import numpy as np
from scipy.stats.distributions import norm

for line in fi.xreadlines():
tmp = line.split('\t')

GenePair = tmp[0].strip()

PCC_A = float(tmp[1].strip())
PCC_B = float(tmp[2].strip())

ZVAL_A = 0.5 * log((1+PCC_A)/(1-PCC_A))
ZVAL_B = 0.5 * log((1+PCC_B)/(1-PCC_B))

ABS_ZVAL_A = abs(ZVAL_A)
ABS_ZVAL_B = abs(ZVAL_B)

Var_A = float(1) / float(21-3) #SAMPLESIZE - 3
Var_B = float(1) / float(18-3) #SAMPLESIZE - 3

WT_A = 1/Var_A #float
WT_B = 1/Var_B #float

ZVAL_A_X_WT_A = ZVAL_A * WT_A #float
ZVAL_B_X_WT_B = ZVAL_B * WT_B #float

SumofWT = (WT_A + WT_B) #float
SumofZVAL_X_WT = (ZVAL_A_X_WT_A + ZVAL_B_X_WT_B) #float

#FIXED MODEL
meanES = SumofZVAL_X_WT / SumofWT #float
Var = float(1) / SumofWT #float
SE = math.sqrt(float(Var)) #float
LL = meanES - (1.96 * SE) #float
UL = meanES - (1.96 * SE) #float
z_score = meanES / SE #float
p_val = scipy.stats.norm.sf(z_score)

#CAL
ES_POWER_X_WT_A = pow(ZVAL_A,2) * WT_A #float
ES_POWER_X_WT_B = pow(ZVAL_B,2) * WT_B #float
WT_POWER_A = pow(WT_A,2)
WT_POWER_B = pow(WT_B,2)
SumofES_POWER_X_WT = ES_POWER_X_WT_A + ES_POWER_X_WT_B
SumofWT_POWER = WT_POWER_A + WT_POWER_B

#COMPUTE TAU
tmp_A = ZVAL_A - meanES
tmp_B = ZVAL_B - meanES
temp = pow(SumofZVAL_X_WT,2)

Q = SumofES_POWER_X_WT - (temp /(SumofWT))
if PCC_A !=0 or PCC_B !=0:
df = 0
else:
df = 1

c = SumofWT - ((pow(SumofWT,2))/SumofWT)
if c == 0:
tau_square = 0
else:
tau_square = (Q - df) / c

#calculation
Var_total_A = Var_A + tau_square
Var_total_B = Var_B + tau_square

WT_total_A = float(1) / Var_total_A
WT_total_B = float(1) / Var_total_B

ZVAL_X_WT_total_A = ZVAL_A * WT_total_A
ZVAL_X_WT_total_B = ZVAL_B * WT_total_B

Sumoftotal_WT = WT_total_A + WT_total_B
Sumoftotal_ZVAL_X_WT= ZVAL_X_WT_total_A + ZVAL_X_WT_total_B

#RANDOM MODEL
RM_meanES = Sumoftotal_ZVAL_X_WT / Sumoftotal_WT
RM_Var = float(1) / Sumoftotal_WT
RM_SE = math.sqrt(float(RM_Var))
RM_LL = RM_meanES - (1.96 * RM_SE)
RM_UL = RM_meanES + (1.96 * RM_SE)
RM_z_score = RM_meanES / RM_Var
RM_p_val = scipy.stats.norm.sf(RM_z_score)

• You import numpy but don't take advantage of its vectorized operations. See What is NumPy? to get some ideas. Nov 1 '13 at 8:16
• Your program doesn't seem to produce any output. Why is that? Have you cut out the bit that does the output? Or have you not written it yet? Nov 1 '13 at 10:11

The first thing for solving a problem like this is to find out what the actual bottleneck is. In your case the two most likely parameters are disk IO or CPU power.

Disk IO

• Make sure the data sits on local drives and not on a network share or USB stick or similar.
• Make sure your disks are reasonably fast (SSDs might help).
• Put your input file and your output file on two different hard drives.
• mmap might gain you some speed in reading and/or writing the data. At least in this case it seemed to make a difference.

CPU

• There are several calculations you perform for each line in the input file but those numbers seem to be static (unless the script you posted is incomplete)
• Var_A = float(1) / float(21-3) #SAMPLESIZE - 3 looks like a constant to me which can be calculated once.
• Similar Var_B
• From these two a bunch of other variables are calculated which would also be static: WT_A, WT_B, SumofWT, Var, SE, WT_POWER_A, WT_POWER_B, SumofWT_POWER, c
• Might not make a huge impact but still seems redundant
• As each line seems to be independently calculated this code would be a prime example for parallelization. I have not much experience with python and parallel programming but the ProcessPoolExecutor seems like a good start. Bascially utilize as many processes as you have cores and split your input into chunks to be distributed to the processes. You'd have to collect the results (and presumably make sure you write them out in the correct order) so this will make your code a bit more complicated but has the potential to speed up your calculations close to a factor of N (assuming N is the number of CPU cores) provided disk IO is not killing you.
• You could also split the input, distribute it to other computers in the office and get the processing done there and collect the results.