Virus detection claims to be 360X faster on GPUs than on Core 2 Duo

Kapersky Lap in Russia says that its security software is 360X faster when using an NVIDIA Tesla S1070 GPU than when using a Core 2 Duo processor from Intel. Here’s how Nvidia describes it:

When the Kaspersky anti-virus software on a computer suspects that a file may be malicious, even though it may not match any known virus signatures, the software uploads this file to the Kaspersky Lab data center. The server software then compares the suspected file against more than 50 million known good files and programs. Using complex anti-virus and SPAM detection algorithms, Kaspersky’s server software identifies the risk level of the suspected file and informs the client computer on what kind of preventive action to take..

That seems to be quite a “brute force” approach, and I’m not sure by how much security is actually improved (I suspect “not by much” for regular folks), but it’s always interesting to see how graphics processor architectures can be used for. Using GPUs to detect virus has been looked at in the past few years but that’s the first commercial application that I know of.