In order to create a Joint Innovation Lab, NVIDIA is joining forces with the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), which is tasked with advancing bioinformatics applications through the use of GPU acceleration. Through this combined efforts, NVIDIA hope to advance life science research and improve response time for virus outbreaks and health issues.
The announcement came at BioIT APAC Conference and Expo, in Shenzhen, China, the first event in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region to focus on facilitating the exchange of information and technologies that are driving biomedical research and drug development. The APAC region has become a hotbed of research activity in the bio and life sciences spaces.
BGI is a great partner for NVIDIA. It’s established itself as a world-class research institution and is the developer of many of the most popular bioinformatics applications used worldwide.
The formation of the Joint Innovation Lab stems from a longer relationship that NVIDIA has had with BGI. Developers there have been working for the last few months to tweak some of their bioinformatics applications to run faster with the help of NVIDIA GPUs. These types of applications tend to be large, complex and computationally intensive, so they have an almost insatiable demand for moreperformance and speed – the kind of performance that GPU technology puts within reach.
In fact, the team at BGI has already ported two key applications to the GPU: GSNP (Genomic Short-read Nucleotide Alignment Program) and SOAP3 (Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package) – two of the leading, GPU-accelerated, software packages in the genomics space. Early tests of these applications show that they have already achieved performance increases of up to 20x – which is hugely impressive given the short amount of time they have been working on it.
This was announced by Kimberly Powell on the 6th July 2011 at the NVIDIA blog. Well, this is a good step for GPU Acceleration.
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