NVIDIA employees have stepped up to the plate on behalf of a very worthy cause. Earlier this week, the NVIDIA Foundation dedicated $400,000 in grants to turn innovative computing methods into cancer-fighting technologies as part its Compute the Cure effort.
Two projects – one at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the other based on the distributed computing power of Folding@home – will each receive $200,000 from the employee-led foundation. The funds will go to helping the researchers analyze and disseminate genomic data – a growing bottleneck for DNA-based research.
The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute team, under the leadership of John Quackenbush, professor of biostatistics and computational biology, is mining tumor genomic data to identify genetic subtypes that can be applied to the development of new treatments. As the cost of sequencing falls and data grows, more and more resources are required for analysis. The Dana-Farber team recently launched a program to collect data from more than 10,000 patients each year. Researchers will look for commonalities in the mutations that may shed insight into a therapy, but it’s a tedious and time-consuming process. Quackenbush is investigating the potential of GPUs to speed the pace of these life-saving discoveries.
The other team, led by Vijay Pande, professor of chemistry, structural biology and computer science at Stanford University, is investigating new breast cancer treatments with the help of the Folding@home volunteer computing army. The grid-based software program uses spare cycles to simulate protein folding. When this fundamental biological process goes awry, it can result in all kinds of diseases, including many cancers. So far, Folding@home has 164,000 machines with a collective 39,000 teraflops of computing power, making it the world’s largest distributed supercomputer. Pande wants to improve the project with cutting-edge molecular simulation and machine learning techniques to enable more targeted and effective treatments for cancer and eventually other diseases as well.
The Compute the Cure initiative supports projects that can leverage parallel computing technology to advance cancer research. Company grants and employee fundraising efforts have yielded $1,000,000 to cancer research since the effort was established in 2011. Recipients are selected by NVIDIA employees with the assistance of the National Cancer Institute.