GPGPU drastically accelerates anti-virus software

A LOT HAS BEEN said and written about GPGPU and all the great things that this concept will bring, from faster Folding@Home to earth-moving simulations and other complex problems. This is mostly due to the fact that regular CPU has its doors closed when it comes to the fearsome operation divide, yet alone programs that including SIN/COS instructions.

We know that R600 is a GPGPU monster, and that is now confirmed to us by no other than Kaspersky SafeStream, developed in cooperation with Tarari inc., young company from the Valley with 45 brilliant engineers and staffers. The lure of accelerating technologies was such that Tarari was recently acquired by LSI Corporation.

But to get back onto the subject, Tarrari used RegEx Demonstration to compare a 2S Dual-Core Opteron with R600 powered boards and came up with interesting result.

AntiVirus scan that makes the difference

When running Kaspersky SafeStream, GPU powered search achieved 6.2 Gbps (775 MB/s) during scanning a hard drive array, quite close to maximum speed that RAID field could have provided, while DSDC Opteron processors were loaded between one and two percent. When Opteron was doing the same search, it was only 21x slower, at 295 Mbps, or 36 MB/s.

We wonder will future graphics cards come to market with AntiVirus programs instead of bundled games. It just might prove more useful than year old games and other stuff from so-called value packs. µ