Nvidia today announced that BGI, the world’s largest genomics institute, has slashed the time to analyze batches of DNA sequencing data from nearly four days to just six hours using a Nvidia Tesla GPU-based server farm. The speed up is considered a critically important step in determining, in an affordable manner, the chemical building blocks that make up a DNA molecule. BGI does groundbreaking work in sequencing the genomes of a wide range of life forms, ranging from plants and E.coli to the giant panda, to develop better medicines, improve healthcare and develop genetically enhanced food. BGI’s sequencing output is expected to soon surpass the equivalent of more than 700,000 human genomes per year, a dramatic increase over initial efforts, which took 13 years to sequence a single genome.
Tesla GPUs are massively parallel accelerators based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture. Application developers can accelerate their applications either by using CUDA C, CUDA C++, CUDA Fortran, or by using the simple, easy-to-use directive-based compilers. BGI was founded in Beijing on Sept 9th, 1999 with the mission of supporting the development of science and technology, building strong research teams, and promoting the development of scientific partnership in genomics field
