Kaspersky Lab leverages NVIDIA Tesla for virus detection

Derek Brush (lordbean) Kaspersky uses NVIDIA Tesla GPU to detect new viruses and achieves 360-fold performance increase over the common CPU.

December 14, 2009 7:40 PM ET in News, , , , ,

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Kaspersky Labs has begun experimenting with new detection software designed to leverage the power of NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs.

Kaspersky uses a similarity algorithm in their search for new viruses on the Internet. The algorithm is designed to scrutinize files downloaded from the web and compare them to known viral strains in an attempt to isolate rogue chunks of code which could be viruses. When a virus is identified, it is added to a definition update which is later sent out to all end-user Kaspersky anti-virus clients when they synchronize with the server.

Kaspersky has rewritten their similarity engine in CUDA, and is now experimenting with the modified software on an NVIDIA Tesla S1070 setup. In initial testing, Kaspersky claims the CUDA-based engine achieved, “a 360-fold increase in the speed of the similarity-defining algorithm when compared to the popular Intel Core 2 Duo central processor running at a clock speed of 2.6GHz”.

The potential benefit of this approach to virus detection is enormous to Kaspersky’s customers. With such a substantial increase in detection speed of new viruses, customers using Kaspersky anti-virus can be assured that their AV protection will most likely be capable of recognizing new threats before they even have a chance to be infected. Kaspersky plans to build on this design in the future, aiming to eventually run their entire virus detection AI on Tesla-based multi-GPU computers.

8 Comments

  1. 15 Dec '09, 6:20 am Cliff_Forster

    I love where they are going with this. Anything that can leverage my GPU as an additional computing resource I am totally for.

  2. 15 Dec '09, 2:13 pm photodude

    This will be some serious protection for servers and networks. I can see a lot of universities and corporations picking this up once it's released.

  3. 17 Dec '09, 5:09 am ardichoke

    Except for the fact that no server administrator in their right mind bothers to put high end video equipment in a server... Complex video drivers just add one more thing that could take a box down, and on a server that is not what you want.

  4. 17 Dec '09, 2:08 pm photodude
    Quoting ardichoke

    Except for the fact that no server administrator in their right mind bothers to put high end video equipment in a server...

    I would agree your typical admin wouldn't put a tesla on board, but Teslas are not typical server hardware. Anyone in the HPC server market or has large cluster servers (who already have teslas) will be following this closely.

    I would also expect some data centers would be considering a Telsa based antivirus; for the speed and reduced impact on the overall system.

  5. 17 Dec '09, 2:09 pm Thrax

    Not to mention the fact that Tesla products receive the same reliability testing as any other enterprise-class hardware.

  6. 17 Dec '09, 5:30 pm photodude

    Going along with Thrax, I would mention that Tesla's are not "High end Video equipment". The tesla is a CUDA Computing Processor, using GPGPU technology, there are Zero (count them again Zero) ports for video on the tesla. As Thrax said "enterprise-class hardware"

    Get 3 of these little babies and you got yourself a data mining, rendering, matlab, supercomputer. The data mining ability is the aspect of the tesla Kaspersky Labs is exploiting with their anti-virus program.

  7. 17 Dec '09, 11:16 pm ardichoke

    Okay... I was a bit thrown by the Tesla bit and assumed it was just another Nvidia graphics card, my bad on that one. Still though, considering how crashy the nvidia drivers have been on my desktop of late, I would be hesitant at the least to put any part that required nvidia drivers on a server that I needed to stay up and running. The hardware may be enterprise tested, but I've lost faith in their software testing over the past year or so.

  8. 18 Dec '09, 12:56 am Thrax

    Several of the top-10 fastest supercomputers on earth are currently using Telsa products. I'm pretty sure the software testing at the enterprise is fine.

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