Posted on Friday, November 20 2009 @ 5:15 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
reports H1N1 researchers at the University of Illinois use NVIDIA GPUs to speed up their calculations by up to 200-400 times:
Schulten states "When we use systems with GPUs running NAMD and VMD software, this speed is accelerated and we can do simulations of cells. Important biomedical cellular research problems can be solved by the acceleration offered by GPU chips. With NVIDIA GPUs, our calculations can be done between 200 - 400 times faster on the GPU." We all know the speed ups achieved when deploying GPGPU technology, butthe fact of the matter is that we need much more computational powerthan before, especially when we take a look at the limits of the current computation infrastructure.
University of Illinois runs NAMD and VMD research software for simulation and visualization of cell structures in order to focus on cell disruption - yes, how a virus cell reacts to drug treatment and what may be happening in relation to drug resistance. Long story short - they're trying to predict how the H1N1 will evolve so that we could know what to do for future pandemic outbursts of the Influenza A virus.
