Some of you who think ITSx is running slowly despite being assigned multiple CPUs, particularly on datasets with only one kind of sequences (e.g. fungal) using the -t F option might be interested in trying out Andrew Krohn’s parallel ITSx implementation. The solution essentially employs a bash script spawning multiple ITSx instances running on different portions of the input file. Although there are some limitations to the script (e.g. you cannot select a custom name for the output and you will only get the ITS1 and ITS2 + full sequences FASTA files, as far as I understand the script), it may prove useful for many of you until we write up a proper solution to the poor multi-thread performance of ITSx (planned for version 1.1). In the coming months, I recommend that you check this solution out! See also the wiki documentation.

My speed tests shows the following (on a quite small test set of fungal ITS sequences):
ITSx parallel on 16 CPUs, all ITS types (option “-t all“):
3 min, 16 sec
ITSx parallel on 16 CPUs, only fungal ITS types (option “-t f“):
54 sec
ITSx native on 16 CPUs, all ITS types (options “-t all --cpu 16“):
4 min, 59 sec
ITSx native on 16 CPUs, only fungal types (options “-t f --cpu 16“):
5 min, 50 sec

Why fungal only took longer time in the native implementation is a mystery to me, but probably shows why there is a need to rewrite the multithreading code, as we did with Metaxa a couple of years ago. Stay tuned for ITSx updates!