Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Nobel Winner Sees Biology’s Future with GPUs

Five years ago, when Eric Betzig got the call he won a Nobel Prize for inventing a microscope that could see features as small as 20 nanometers, he was already working on a new one. The new device captures the equivalent of 3D video of living cells — and now it’s using NVIDIA GPUs and software to see the results.

Betzig’s collaborator at the University of California at Berkeley, Srigokul Upadhyayula (aka Gokul), helped refine the so-called Lattice Light Sheet system. It generated 600 terabytes of data while exploring part of the visual cortex of a mouse in work published earlier this year in Science magazine. A 1.3TB slice of that effort was on display at NVIDIA’s booth at last week’s SC19 supercomputing show.