Faster exact maximum parsimony search with XMP

摘要

Motivation: Despite trends towards maximum likelihood and Bayesian criteria, maximum parsimony (MP) remains an important criterion for evaluating phylogenetic trees. Because exact MP search is NP-complete, the computational effort needed to find provably optimal trees skyrockets with increasing numbers of taxa, limiting analyses to around 25–30 taxa. This is, in part, because currently available programs fail to take advantage of parallelism.