Ultima Genomics, Inc. unveiled a broad collaboration with NVIDIA that leverages AI-accelerated analysis across multiple stages of the DNA sequencing and analysis process. The collaboration includes the use of NVIDIA GPUs for deep learning in photometry and base calling and will soon include acceleration of variant calling. Over the last five years, Ultima Genomics has developed a fundamentally new sequencing architecture designed to scale beyond conventional approaches, including completely different flow cell engineering, sequencing chemistry, and machine learning.

Ultima is currently in an early access program for the UG 100™, its first high-throughput next-generation sequencing instrument that is using this new technology, which enables customers to generate high-quality sequencing data at a cost of $1/Gb. Genomics Meets AI: The Ultima instrument utilizes NVIDIA A30 GPUs with the NVIDIA Clara [2] AI computing platform to offer highly accurate and accelerated primary and secondary analysis for customers who want to run genomic analyses at scale. Ultima has separately announced partnerships to develop Ultima-specific germline variant calling pipelines for Google's DeepVariant.

These custom models can be run within NVIDIA Clara Parabricks, which accelerates these and other applications for secondary analysis. NVIDIA Clara Parabricks computational pipelines employ NVIDIA's CUDA, HPC, AI and data analytics stacks to deliver GPU-accelerated libraries, pipelines, and reference application workflows for primary, secondary, and tertiary analysis. Off-the-shelf solutions are coupled with a toolkit to support new application development to address the rapidly evolving needs of high-throughput genomic labs.