Introduction:
Network analysis plays an important role in systems biology. However, network analysis algorithms are usually computationally intensive. Mordern General Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) provides a cost-effective platform for this type of applications. We have initiated a project to enable fast network analysis on GPUs. The first verison of the software package gpu-fan (GPU-based Fast Analysis of Networks) includes methods for computing four shortest path-based centrality metrics on NVIDIA's CUDA platform. Speedup of 10x ~ 50x was observed for simulated scale-free networks and real world protein interaction and gene co-expression networks.