Scientists at the Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences have successfully produced the first computer simulation of a complete H1N1 influenza virus using NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, which could lead to a better understanding of the virus and eventually enhanced treatments.

Up until now, studying viruses has been challenging in laboratories because reactions occur too quickly to observe. Also, creating computer simulations was a difficult task because of the complexity associated with simulating "billions" of particles in the correct conditions.

But now, Dr. Ying Ren, assistant professor at the Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a team of researchers, have used the Mole-8.5 GPU-accelerated supercomputer to simulate the whole H1N1 influenza virus.

The Mole-8.5 GPU-accelerated supercomputer contains 288 server nodes and over 2,200 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. The Tesla GPU is NVIDIA's first dedicated General Purpose GPU and targets the high performance computing market due to its high computational power.

"The Mole-8.5 GPU supercomputer is enabling us to perform scientific research that was not possible before," said Ren. "This research is an important step in developing more effective ways to control epidemics and create anti-viral drugs."

By creating a molecular dynamics simulation application, the researchers were able to achieve 770 picoseconds per day with an integration time step of 1 femtosecond for 300 million radicals.