Nvidia Tesla GPUs used to accurately model swine flu in Chinese supercomputer

A Chinese research group has hooked together an obscene number of Nvidia Tesla GPUs in a supercomputer powerful enough to accurately model the deadly H1N1 swine flu virus. The Mole-8.5 supercomputer uses more than 2,200 Tesla graphics cards over 288 server nodes to faithfully simulate the disease, allowing the researchers to perform experiments that are unachievable in the real world. Viruses are extremely dynamic, and experimentation difficult because they can change and react too quickly for us to properly record and analyze, so by creating a perfect computer model, these reactions can be simulated and understood. This supercomputer functions as a “computational microscope,” and is able to recreate a 300 million atom structure of the virus, and to observe its actions one femtosecond at a time. The hope is that this research will allow a new and better understanding of how the disease functions, and how best to fight it.