Chinese crunch human genome with videogame chips
January 10, 2012 | Source: Wired Enterprise
Can GPUs keep up with the torrent of DNA data these machines crank out? (Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
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 processing units (GPUs). 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.
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GPU-based server farm slashes analysis time for DNA sequencing data batches from days to hours