NVIDIA provides free Parabricks software to Coronavirus Researchers

Nvidia has revealed that its genome sequencing software Parabricks can be accessed free of cost by researchers for fighting the COVID-19 outbreak.

The California based company revealed that the Parabricks would be available for around 90 days free of cost.

Executive Opinion

The Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA, Kimberly Powell, said, "Nvidia has asked our family of partners to join us in this urgent effort to assist the research community. We’re in discussions with cloud service providers and supercomputing centers to provide resources and access to Parabricks on their platforms."

NVIDIA's Parabricks for Coronavirus (COVID-19) research

Parabricks, which was acquired by the Nvidia in 2019, has developed the latest technology with which an entire human genome can be sequenced within the time period of less than an hour.

Some of the researchers are in the process of sequencing both the COVID-19 and the genomes of people who have contracted it to understand the spread of the disease. This is a highly compute-intensive task.

With the help of a Parabricks, a process that takes two days can be accomplished in just an hour on a single server, noted the announcement. 

Parabricks uses the GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) to accelerate the analysis of sequence data by as much as around 50 times.