A vital step towards developing a vaccine for any virus is the study of its genome sequence. Amidst the COVID-19 breakout, starting today, Nvidia has opened a free 90-day license to Parabricks to researchers to do exactly this.
NVIDIA is inviting our family of partners to join us in matching this urgent effort to assist the research community. We’re in discussions with cloud service providers and supercomputing centers to provide compute resources and access to Parabricks on their platforms.
Parabricks is Nvidia"s dedicated tool for studying genomic data. Based on the Genome Analysis Toolkit and leveraging the power of GPUs, computations on Parabricks are sped up by more than 50 times. This reduces the time for variant calling on a whole human genome from days to less than an hour on a single server. This speed-up can have an "extraordinary" impact on the development of vaccines for the novel coronavirus, Nvidia wrote on its blog post.
Besides Parabricks, Nvidia also linked a repository of GPU-accelerated tools specifically tailored to researchers working with Oxford Nanopore long-read data. If you have access to Nvidia GPUs, you may fill out this form to secure the free 90-day license for Parabricks.