Breakthrough in HIV Research Enabled by NVIDIA GPU Accelerators

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have achieved a major breakthrough in the battle to fight the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) using NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU accelerators, NVIDIA today announced. Featured on the cover of the latest issue of Nature, the world’s most-cited interdisciplinary science journal, a new paper details how UIUC researchers collaborating with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have, for the first time, determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV “capsid,” a protein shell that protects the virus’s genetic material and is a key to its virulence. Understanding this structure may hold the key to the development of new and more effective antiretroviral drugs to combat a virus that has killed an estimated 25 million people and infected 34 million more.

UIUC researchers uncovered detail about the capsid structure by running the first all-atom simulation of HIV on the Blue Waters Supercomputer. Powered by 3,000 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators – the highest performance, most efficient accelerators ever built – the Cray XK7 supercomputer gave researchers the computational performance to run the largest simulation ever published, involving 64 million atoms.
 
Wow, that's really impressive.
GPU technology has come a long ways in the last decade.
 
Ignoring the hardware, that's a pretty impressive simulation.

Other supercomputers are capable of the feat though. Blue Waters has about 1/6th the processing power of Titan, which also uses a Cray XK7 and K20 GPUs -- just scaled out.

I guess actually doing it is a brag-worthy accomplishment. Props to you, biochem nerds. :)
 
With the recent announcement that bitcoins trumps any supercomputer, I wonder if/when someone will create a mining-for-science platform. End users generate regenue (like bitcoin) by mining, that revenue is paid for by the science project tyat is running their computational data. It'd get more people involved and harness a massive amount of power.
 
I'm curious how they plan to target an enveloped capsid. Although, it would be nice if we had enzymes in our blood to lyse all non-enveloped capsids.
 
So what you're saying is that the Super Computer couldn't have done it without aids?


Ok I stop now.
 
Lol... I can see it now... where prostitution is legal, free HIV vaccinations for prostitutes... wait, the more realistic that seems the less funny it is


Is there anything like folding@home for medical research??
 
niffcreature said:
Is there anything like folding@home for medical research??
Click to expand...

Yes, there are literally dozens of Distributed Computing projects out there, many of which focus on Science. The [H] has a semi-official team in BOINC, which is a wrapper program that runs several projects for science.. Right now I'm running research for the fight against Malaria, and will go back to the fight against Childhood Cancer when the Malaria work runs out.. Go check out the Distributed Computing sub forum, and the DC Vault thread in particular for more info - if you're not into F@H, I'm sure we can help you find a project that fits your interests!
 
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