Researchers working on sequencing the novel coronavirus and the genomes of people afflicted with COVID-19 now have a helping hand — NVIDIA is offering a free 90-day licence to Parabricks, which uses GPUs to accelerate by as much as 50 times the analysis of sequence data.
Based on the well-known Genome Analysis Toolkit, Parabricks breaks down time and cost barriers by providing GPU-accelerated genomic analysis. Data analysis can be done in under an hour instead of days.
With the pandemic spreading rapidly across the world, getting results quickly could have a major impact on understanding the virus’s evolution and the development of vaccines.
“When a crisis hits, we all pitch in with what we have. In response to the current pandemic, NVIDIA is sharing tools with researchers that can accelerate their race to understand the novel coronavirus and help inform a response,” wrote Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA in a blogpost.
She also noted that NVIDIA is in discussions with cloud service providers and supercomputing centres to provide compute resources and access to Parabricks on their platforms.
“We recognise this pandemic is evolving, so we’ll monitor the situation and extend the offer as needed,” said Powell of the 90-day free licence.