We're only starting to see the age of genomics accelerated by GPUs. I think it's still early if you have the technical background.
The product (Dragen) has been around for a few years and now will be integrated in the new generation of sequencers. Extremely impressive technology and a better fit for the niche compared to GPU-based solutions I have seen. More downstream processing and analytics is sometimes closer to traditional ML and naturally there are lots of GPU-based algos.
Agreed that competition is good to have. There is also Sentieon and similar solutions which run on common hardware but are optimized.
Speaking of costs (both upfront and licensing), dragen imo is not expensive relative to sequencing costs (e.g. sequencers and flowcells). Surely it would be expensive to buy for occasional use.
By making parabricks free to use Nvidia tries to gain a market share I guess. In professional settings you still end up buying support and likely dedicated hardware (which is comparable in pricing). Good fit for the cloud and research environments that already have access to GPUs and/or are decoupled from actual sequencing.