Hidden Evolutionary History Uncovered Using GPUs

The HMS Beagle took naturalist Charles Darwin on a round-the-world journey that helped him unlock ideas about the process of evolution. Almost two centuries later, another BEAGLE is helping scientists unblock bottlenecks in complex genetic data to advance our understanding of the living world, and potentially save lives. This 21st century BEAGLE, which stands for Broad-platform Evolutionary Analysis General Likelihood Evaluator, is an open source library and API using NVIDIA GPUs. The speed with which its software can crunch through data is a critical step in analyzing biological sequence data such as DNA, which carries the genetic material of all living organisms and many viruses, including those that cause AIDS, influenza and Ebola.