Tech giant Nvidia pledges further support against the COVID-19 pandemic with a free 90-day license to its latest software “Parabricks”.
Nvidia most notably known for their production of top of the line graphics cards announced their support against Coronavirus in a blog post via their website. The post detailed the companies’ decision to offer their latest analytic software Parabricks, to any researcher, worldwide, free of charge, for 90 days.
Starting today, NVIDIA will provide a free 90-day license to Parabricks to any researcher in the worldwide effort to fight the novel coronavirus.
Parabricks is a genomic analytic tool. A software that, as Nvidia states “speeds up the process of analyzing whole genomes”. How does this help researchers you ask? In short, Parabricks is a program that uses the processing power of NVIDIA GPUs to increase the speeds of genomic analytics by as much as 50 times. The offer is an attempt to aid researches who are fighting the virus on the cellular front. Specifically, those who are currently sequencing the coronavirus and the genomes of affected individuals.
Parabricks joined the Nvidia team in late 2019 and is at the bleeding edge of NVIDIA’s technology. The software itself has the potential to reduce the time it takes to sequence a whole genome from a day to less than an hour. The technology will no doubt be of help expediting processes of cellular data analysis. In turn, giving us more information on the virus at a much faster rate and thus potentially accelerate chances for finding a cure.
The news comes days after Nvidia’s announcement of its folding for a cure project. In which PC users around the world were invited to donate their unused GPU and CPU computing power to aid in the fight against Coronavirus and other diseases. If you’re interested in using your computer to support the fight you can find out more about project folding@home here.
It is clear that companies are doing all they can to offer aid amid the chaos and uncertainty of this pandemic.
