Presentation
Wafer-Scale Simulation of Mutator Allele Dynamics in Large Asexual Populations
DescriptionWithin evolving microbial populations, genes that elevate mutation rate impose a fundamental trade-off: on one hand, increasing harmful mutations among offspring, but, on the other, allowing more opportunities for rare beneficial mutations. Existing single-CPU agent-based simulation work suggests that increased population size should generally favor the proliferation of mutator alleles due to "hitch-hiking" effects associated with beneficial mutation discovery. However, in contrast to this expectation, this outcome is often not the case in large asexual populations found in nature. To address this knowledge gap, we leveraged the 850,000-processor Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) to increase simulation scale up to 1.5 billion-agent populations. In benchmarks, WSE provided 294× speedup over GPU and 111,091× speedup over single-core CPU execution. Among other results, our experiments indicate that limitation of adaptive potential (i.e., few beneficial mutations available) can produce a tertiary regime where complete mutator allele takeover becomes disfavored at very large population sizes.
Event Type
Research and ACM SRC Posters
TimeTuesday, 18 November 20258:00am - 5:00pm CST
LocationSecond Floor Atrium
Archive
view
Similar Presentations