News

The best paper presented at the Symposium on Chemical Computations on General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units, to be held in conjunction with the 240th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Boston, Aug. 22-26, will be rewarded with an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU computing processor courtesy of NVIDIA. 

At Temple University, researchers have developed models that measure the effects of applying anesthesia on molecules within nerve cells. The models currently run on a supercomputer, but plans are underway to perform the calculations on an Nvidia GPU cluster with four nodes. This will both save money and give researchers more flexibility to conduct tests when they're ready to do so (instead of having to wait for their scheduled time to use a supercomputer).

CyberChem partners Thom H. Dunning, Jr. and Volodymyr Kindratenko, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Todd J. Martinez, Stanford University; Robert J. Harrison, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Jeffrey Madura, Duquesne University are organizing a symposium on "Chemical Computations on General Purpose Graphics Processing Units" to be held in conjunction with the Fall 2010 national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston. The symposium will provide technical presentations from the companies that are advancing the development of general purpose graphics processing units (GP-GPUs), discussions of the challenges involved in effectively programming GP-GPUs, and presentations on the use of GP-GPUs in a broad range of chemical applications.

Improving the cleaning power of shampoos and liquid detergents and making them more environmentally friendly is as much a computer problem as it is a balance of chemicals. By harnessing the parallel processing power of GPUs, the Temple University research team led by Axel Kohlmeyer is developing a computer simulation model that provides a fast, cost effective and accurate tool for research and development of surfactant molecules.

As GPU vendor NVIDIA releases its Bio Workbench, a number of researchers--including Temple's Axel Kohlmeyer, Illinois' Klaus Schulten and John Stone, and Stanford's Todd Martinez--comment on the power of GPUs to accelerate their research.