The research team led by Professor Se Young Chun of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University has been selected for the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program.

The NVIDIA Academic Grant Program is an initiative that supports AI researchers at accredited academic institutions worldwide, particularly full-time faculty at research-focused universities, including those in PhD programs. Selected teams undergo a rigorous evaluation process and are provided with computational resources for AI research at no cost. Through this program, Professor Chun’s team will receive 32,000 GPU-hours on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, delivered via the cloud-based high-performance computing platform Brev.

In collaboration with Professor Hoon Kim’s research at Sungkyunkwan University, the team will utilize these resources to develop a megabase-scale DNA foundation model. The model will be specifically optimized for analyzing extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA), which is closely associated with rapid cancer progression, treatment resistance, and high intratumoral heterogeneity. Existing analysis methods often require several days, creating a major bottleneck in research. The team aims to dramatically reduce analysis time from days to a significantly shorter duration through this foundation model.

Leveraging large-scale GPU resources, this research is expected to overcome current limitations in cancer genomics analysis and contribute to the acceleration of both fundamental research and clinical applications in the field.

Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57624

Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr