Today Nvidia announced that Chinese researchers have used GPUs to achieve a major breakthrough in the race to battle influenza.
The Mole-8.5 GPU supercomputer is enabling us to perform scientific research that simply was not possible before,” said Dr. Ying Ren, assistant professor at CAS-IPE. “This research is an important step in developing more effective ways to control epidemics and create anti-viral drugs.”
Using a “computational microscope,” powered by more than 2,200 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, researchers were able to simulate the entire H1N1 influenza virus. Due to the speed of reactions, studying bacteria and viruses in laboratory experiments is difficult. With billions of particles, these systems require huge computational resources to simulate accurately.
The Mole-8.5 GPU supercomputer is comprised of 288 server nodes. The system was able to simulate “770 picoseconds per day with an integration time step of 1 femtosecond for 300 million atoms or radicals.” Read the Full Story.
