Chinese Lab Speeds Through Genome Processing With GPUs

Eric Smalley writes "The world's largest genome sequencing center once needed four days to analyze data describing a human genome. Now it needs just six hours. The trick is servers built with graphics chips — the sort of processors that were originally designed to draw images on your personal computer. They're called graphics processing units, or GPUs — a term coined by chip giant Nvidia. This fall, BGI — a mega lab headquartered in Shenzhen, China — switched to servers that use GPUs built by Nvidia, and this slashed its genome analysis time by more than an order of magnitude."

Comments

A reminder

[Mannfred]

It's hardly news that GPUs can be used to speed up parallel tasks/computations, but even so this article is a useful reminder of two things; 1) there are still many important processes that can be sped up by using GPUs, and 2) this can be achieved pretty much anywhere in the world.