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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."
Sounds like these newfangled "GPUs" are gonna change the world.
I always wondered what GPUs are. Thanks Slashdot!
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.
The summary is pulled directly from the top of the article.
Here's the article from HPC Wire and some details from nvidia as well as the nvidia press release
... this is what a Chinese lab looks like.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari