NVIDIA Grants $200,000 for Cancer Research

NVIDIA Grants $200,000 for Cancer Research

 

Nvidia has granted $200,000 to the University of Toronto to help them use GPUs to learn and identify cancer causing genetic mutations as part of their development of what they call their “genetic interpretation engine”. 

This money will be given to them by the Nvidia Foundation, which is Nvidia’s employee-driven philanthropy arm which is designed to advance the fight against cancer and improve education. 

 

As computers grow more powerful, scientists are delving into giant datasets and deploying computer simulations to research how cancer develops. 

Part of our “Compute the Cure” initiative, the NVIDIA Foundation’s grant will help Frey’s team (At the University of Totonto) scale up their GPU-powered methods so they can be applied to a large number of personal genomes in clinical settings, ultimately involving hundreds of thousands of genomes. 

 

 

The research at work at the University of Toronto is highly complex and I am not the most well educated man in the world about Cancer research, so it is advisable to read Nvidia’s own blog post on this matter if you want to learn more about this matter. 

Before this funding the team behind this research used a large number of Nvidia GPU in servers and desktops, which included Nvidia’s Tesla K80, K40 and K20 GPUs as well as several desktop grade GTX Titan X GPUs. 

With such a large boost in funding and the direct support of Nvidia themselves the computational tasks ahead will surely get a little easier, but much work is still needed before this research can have an impact on the lives of cancer patients and the others who are affected by the disease. 

 

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