He National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC) makes available to researchers and scientists working on solutions to the new coronavirus pandemic, free of charge, the parallel processing resources (GPU) of the Santos Dumont supercomputer with the software Parabricks ¹ from NVIDIA Enterprise.
Santos Dumont is the largest supercomputer in Latin America and is located in Petrópolis, in Rio de Janeiro. He is involved in around 150 research projects addressing oil and gas exploration, coal and renewable energy, HIV drug development, climate studies, and research on the Zika virus, dengue fever, and currently , also the new coronavirus.
To streamline the process, the supercomputer was upgraded with 376 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs in December 2019, bringing it to a total processing capacity of approximately 5.1 quadrillion operations per second. That’s roughly a 360% increase compared to the original 2015 specification of 1.1 petaflops.
Parabricks uses GPUs to accelerate genome analysis up to 50 times the speed from server to server. This software can reduce the time to analyze a complete human genome from 2 days to less than an hour. Given the unprecedented spread of the pandemic, generating results in hours instead of days could have an extraordinary impact on the understanding of the evolution of the virus and the development of vaccines.
“The Santos Dumont supercomputer will be used to process human exomes and genomes and Covid-19 genomes. With the NVIDIA Parabricks Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) package, which runs on GPU nodes, we will search for variants in DNA samples from patients and viruses, in order to understand the behavior of the disease in different individuals to support strategies on how to face the pandemic. ”, explains Luiz Gonzaga, a technologist at the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing.
Those interested in using these tools for research related to the new coronavirus should send the project through the link with the official form .
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/elfinanciero/TGQKVJH5CBBRJMMO73AF2E3NYQ.jpg "“Chelsea’s Co-Owner Predicts Victory, but Real Madrid Takes the Lead: Can Chelsea Make a Comeback in Second Leg of Champions League Quarterfinals?”")