JELLYFISH

JELLYFISH is a tool for fast, memory-efficient counting of k-mers in DNA. A k-mer is a substring of length k, and counting the occurrences of all such substrings is a central step in many analyses of DNA sequence. JELLYFISH can count k-mers using an order of magnitude less memory and an order of magnitude faster than other k-mer counting packages by using an efficient encoding of a hash table and by exploiting the "compare-and-swap" CPU instruction to increase parallelism.

JELLYFISH is a command-line program that reads FASTA and multi-FASTA files containing DNA sequences. It outputs its k-mer counts in an binary format, which can be translated into a human-readable text format using the "jellyfish dump" command. See the documentation below for more details.

For more information visit http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/jellyfish/