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Kaspersky enlists CUDA to kill viruses

by on15 December 2009


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Delivers the AV promise 


For years
Nvidia has been touting its Tesla GPGPU platform as the next big thing in computing. It can be used to build supercomputers for massive parallel computing tasks, dull scientific stuff and we hear it's a rather good basis for toasters, too.

However, Kaspersky decided to be a bit more sensible and utilize Tesla's number crunching prowess to improve security. We already mentioned CUDA could be used to run security software, here. The Russian security incorporated Tesla S1070 units into its security infrastructure to boost client protection. Kaspersky claims the Tesla managed to outperform a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo in certain tasks by a factor of 360. No, it's not 360 percent faster, it's 360 times faster.

Kaspersky redeveloped its similarity algorithms and optimized them to simultaneously perform hundreds of thousands of instructions. Kaspersky boffins utilized the Nvidia CUDA SDK development environment specifically for this purpose as it allows programs to be written for the latest generations of NVIDIA graphics processors in standard programming languages.

Mind you, this doesn't mean regular users with Nvidia GPUs support stand to benefit from the technology anytime soon, but could be a sign of things to come. Both Nvidia and ATI are pushing parallel computing and offering some rudimentary GPGPU capabilities, mainly in the video encoding department. Using GPUs to power AV software is something much more useful than video transcoding and could bring GPGPU to a much wider audience.

Last modified on 15 December 2009
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