  This paper introduces a high-throughput software tool framework called {\it
sam2bam} that enables users to significantly speedup pre-processing for
next-generation sequencing data. The sam2bam is especially efficient on
single-node multi-core large-memory systems. It can reduce the runtime of data
pre-processing in marking duplicate reads on a single node system by 156-186x
compared with de facto standard tools. The sam2bam consists of parallel
software components that can fully utilize the multiple processors, available
memory, high-bandwidth of storage, and hardware compression accelerators if
available.
  The sam2bam provides file format conversion between well-known genome file
formats, from SAM to BAM, as a basic feature. Additional features such as
analyzing, filtering, and converting the input data are provided by {\it
plug-in} tools, e.g., duplicate marking, which can be attached to sam2bam at
runtime.
  We demonstrated that sam2bam could significantly reduce the runtime of NGS
data pre-processing from about two hours to about one minute for a whole-exome
data set on a 16-core single-node system using up to 130 GB of memory. The
sam2bam could reduce the runtime for whole-genome sequencing data from about 20
hours to about nine minutes on the same system using up to 711 GB of memory.
