  String barcoding is a recently introduced technique for genomic-based
identification of microorganisms. In this paper we describe the engineering of
highly scalable algorithms for robust string barcoding. Our methods enable
distinguisher selection based on whole genomic sequences of hundreds of
microorganisms of up to bacterial size on a well-equipped workstation, and can
be easily parallelized to further extend the applicability range to thousands
of bacterial size genomes. Experimental results on both randomly generated and
NCBI genomic data show that whole-genome based selection results in a number of
distinguishers nearly matching the information theoretic lower bounds for the
problem.
