NVIDIA Offers Parabricks Free to COVID-19 Researchers, Accelerating Genomic Analysis by 50x

When a crisis strikes, everyone must go all out to respond. To combat the novel coronavirus outbreak, NVIDIA has provided researchers with tools to accelerate their understanding of COVID-19 and support the development of countermeasures.

Effective today, NVIDIA will provide 90 days of free access to Parabricks for all novel coronavirus researchers worldwide. Built on the renowned Genome Analysis Toolkit, Parabricks leverages GPUs to accelerate sequence data analysis by up to 50-fold.

As the outbreak continues to evolve, NVIDIA will closely monitor the situation and provide additional support as needed.

Researchers using Oxford Nanopore long-read data can find GPU-accelerated tool repositories on GitHub. Additionally, the following applications have built-in NVIDIA GPU acceleration: Medaka, Racon, Raven, Reticulatus, and Unicycler.

Currently, researchers are sequencing the genomes of the novel coronavirus and individuals infected with COVID-19 to understand how the disease spreads and to identify populations susceptible to infection. However, analyzing genomic sequences requires substantial time and computational power.

Accelerating scientific research has long been one of NVIDIA’s core missions. The Parabricks team joined NVIDIA last December, providing state-of-the-art tools for this effort. It enables rapid analysis of an individual’s entire genomic variant profile on a single server, reducing analysis time from days to under an hour.

Given the unprecedented transmission speed of this epidemic, reducing the time to obtain results from days to hours can significantly advance our understanding of viral evolution and vaccine development.

NVIDIA is inviting its partners to join this urgent effort, providing assistance to researchers and engaging in discussions with cloud service providers and supercomputing centers about offering computing resources and access to Parabricks on their platforms.

For readers who wish to learn more about NVIDIA Parabricks, please clickHereGet the White Paper.