NVIDIA Offers Free Access to Genome-Sequencing Software to COVID-19 Researchers

On March 19, GPU maker NVIDIA announced it's giving away free 90-day licenses of its genome-sequencing software Parabricks to researchers in the fight against Coronavirus.

According to the company's blog post, “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.”

To gain access, researchers need to fill out a request form.

Parabricks is a GPU-accelerated genome analysis toolkit developed by the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based firm Parabricks. The firm was acquired by NVIDIA for an undisclosed amount last December.

Because the software takes advantages of the computing cores in the GPU, “data that once took days to analyze can now be done in under an hour,” NVIDIA says.

With compute-intensive software such as Parabricks, the massive number of computing cores assigned to the job can dramatically shorten the completion time. Hence, cloud-hosted or on-demand GPU computing resources are a critical component of the application.

In the blog post announcing the giveaway, NVIDIA says, “We’re in discussions with cloud service providers and supercomputing centers to provide compute resources and access to Parabricks on their platforms.”

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