DISCO is a multi threaded and multiprocess distributed memory overlap-layout-consensus (OLC) metagenome assembler. Disco was developed as a scalable assembler to assemble large metagenomes from billions of Illumina sequencing reads of complex microbial communities. Disco was parallelized for computer clusters in a hybrid architecture that integrated shared-memory multi-threading, point-to-point message passing, and remote direct memory access. The assembly and scaffolding were performed using an iterative overlap graph approach.
