The technique - which centres on using the Tesla S1070 graphics chipset from Nvidia - can achieve speed advantages of as much as 360 times that of a dual-core standard PC, Kaspersky said.
Using graphics cards/chips to accelerate number-crunching on the security front is not new, as another Russian firm - Elcomsoft - started using this approach with its `password recovery' software a few years ago.
When the Kaspersky anti-virus software 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 centre
At this point, one or more Tesla S1070-enabled PCs kick into action and, using complex anti-virus and spam detection algorithms, Kaspersky's anti-virus servers scan to quickly identify the risk level of the suspected file and take appropriate action.
According to Nikolay Grebennikov, Kaspersky's CTO, whilst researching the use of advanced technologies, the company could not ignore the advantages of modern graphics processing units (GPU) for its anti-virus service.
"In terms of efficiency they have long been far ahead of central processing units and the tasks that they are capable of performing have gone beyond the scope of basic graphics processing", he said.
"The architecture of the GPUs is optimised for the parallel processing of large data arrays and we have already started to use this attribute to provide our clients with an even better level of protection from new malicious programmes", he added.
Kaspersky Lab said it is planning to expand the application of highly-efficient parallel computing on graphics processors.