NVIDIA Files Prospectus for GPU-Accelerated Genomic Sequencing Analysis Platform

Genomics plays a pivotal role in the future of healthcare, providing practical insights for population-level research and clinical treatment. More than 50 countries and regions worldwide have announced population-scale genomics initiatives, involving the sequencing of thousands to millions of genomes. The data generated by these initiatives will drive fundamental breakthroughs, enabling healthcare institutions to enhance diagnostic and therapeutic practices.

Over the past decade, numerous next-generation high-throughput sequencers have emerged, yet they have also posed formidable challenges for data analysis. Genomic data is highly complex and computationally intensive, with its volume doubling every seven months—a growth rate that surpasses the combined data generation of YouTube, Netflix, and astronomy. While accuracy, cost, and speed are critical considerations, traditional CPU-based approaches fail to provide researchers with the computational power necessary to manage this surge in data.

In cancer genomics, sequencing the entire human genome can generate up to 1 TB of data. Aligning the genome to a reference sequence, identifying genomic variants, and deriving actionable insights requires more than 1,000 CPU hours. With NVIDIA GPUs and accelerated software, these compute-intensive tasks can be performed 30 to 60 times faster.

To address these pressing issues, researchers have turned their attention to GPUs, expecting them to facilitate the high-throughput, highly parallel applications required for genomic analysis.

As part of the United Arab Emirates Population Genomics Program, Group 42 (G42) has built Artemis, a GPU-powered supercomputer based on NVIDIA DGX™ systems, delivering 7.2 petaFLOPS of computing power. By deploying the accelerated genomic analysis software suite NVIDIA Clara™ Parabricks on this system, they aim to deepen scientific understanding of the Emirati genome and enhance the nation’s healthcare standards.

GPUs are also driving a series of clinical discoveries. The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) uses genomic sequencing to investigate how children with rare neurological disorders respond to different treatment regimens. TGen’s high-performance computing infrastructure, powered by NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and Clara Parabricks Pipelines, delivers analytical results within a single day, helping researchers and clinicians design more effective treatment plans.

Leveraging NVIDIA Clara Parabricks Pipelines (software designed for high-throughput laboratories) and the NVIDIA Clara Parabricks Toolkit (a technology stack built for developers to create genomics tools), NVIDIA enables unprecedented acceleration in primary, secondary, and tertiary analysis of DNA and RNA genomic data. By harnessing GPUs to power AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and data analytics on a single platform, geneticists gain access to tools optimized for speed, accuracy, and cost, allowing them to identify variants, assess gene expression, and discover biomarkers from base-pair data.

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