AlphaFast: High-throughput AlphaFold 3 via GPU-accelerated MSA construction
AlphaFold 3 (AF3) enables accurate biomolecular modeling but is limited by slow, CPU-bound multiple sequence alignment (MSA) generation. We introduce AlphaFast, a drop-in framework that integrates GPU-accelerated MMseqs2 sequence search to remove this bottleneck. AlphaFast achieves a 68.5× speedup in MSA construction and a 22.8× reduction in end-to-end runtime on a single GPU, and delivers predictions in 8 seconds per input on four GPUs while maintaining indistinguishable structural accuracy. A serverless deployment enables structure prediction for as little as $0.035 per input. Code is available at https://github.com/RomeroLab/alphafast.
Authors
- Benjamin Perry
- Philip A. Romero (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2586-7263)
- J Kim
Institutions
- Duke University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Published
- 2026-02-18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.17.706409
- Primary Topic
- Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00