OpenACC Helps Speed Treatments for Genetic Disorders

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Today Nvidia announced that Chinese researchers were able to dramatically accelerate the DNADist genomics application using OpenACC.

As a distance-matrix application, DNADist is used to develop treatments for genetic conditions such as Down syndrome. Using the CAPS Enterprise OpenACC Compiler, Shanghai Jia Tong University researchers accelerated the DNADist application by 16 times on an NVIDIA Tesla GPU-based system by adding just four simple hints — known as “directives” — to the application code.

I am astonished at how quickly and easily OpenACC unlocked the power of GPU acceleration for DNADist, which is one of our most critical applications,” said Steve Pan, project director, Roche Pharma Global Informatics. “The potential impact of GPUs is priceless because getting our products to market faster, even one day earlier, will save more lives.”

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