Volunteer Compute Cycles at GPUGrid.Net are Fighting HIV

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Clipped from http://www.gpugrid.net/

Over at EE Times, Sylvie Barak writes that a grid of GPUs is being used to fight the battle against AIDS and the HIV virus. At the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute and UPF in Barcelona, researchers have been using GPUGRID.net, a voluntary distributed computing platform leveraging GPU accelerators to deliver “virtual supercomputing” performance to examine how a protein responsible for the maturation of the virus releases itself to initiate infection.

GPUs have been crucial,” said Dr. Gianni De Fabritiis, lead researcher, explaining that without them it would have been very difficult to simulate such slow biological processes from an atomistic point of view. “It allows to get us closer to biology and see how proteins work,” he said.

Dr. De Fabritiis added that having a structural picture of this step in HIV maturation was important because it facilitated being able to perform drug design on it. Read the Full Story.