SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - January 14, 2010) - 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 NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs, researchers at Temple University are developing a
computer simulation model which provides companies like Procter and Gamble with a
fast, cost effective and accurate tool for research and development of surfactant
molecules.
Surfactants have many uses; for example they provide the cleaning capacity and
texture of shampoos, laundry detergents, and many other cleaning products. Their job
is to attach themselves to dirt and make it mix with water, and their effectiveness
in this process determines their ability to clean. The process of finding new,
better surfactants and testing their effectiveness in laboratories is time consuming
and costly.
"The computer models needed to accurately simulate surfactant properties are
extremely demanding in terms of computational power," said Axel Kohlmeyer of the
Institute for Computational Molecular Science at Temple University. "We discovered
that by adding just two NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs, each node in our newest cluster can
do 16 times more work, and thus multiplies our local compute capacity far beyond
what we could previously get through the national supercomputing centers."
"To put this into context, we can run a single GPU-optimized molecular dynamics
simulation on two Tesla GPUs as fast as we can on 128 CPU cores of a Cray XT3
supercomputer or on 1024 CPUs of an IBM BlueGene/L machine with conventional
software," continues Dr. Kohlmeyer. "With the NVIDIA Tesla GPU-based solution, we
now have a more powerful, cost-effective solution that will enable us to advance
critical research at a much faster pace. We're moving rapidly ahead to deploy a
larger Tesla GPU cluster at Temple, which will give another huge boost to our work."
The Temple researchers are using GPU-accelerated HOOMD (Highly Optimized Object
Oriented
Molecular Dynamics) simulation software, written by researchers at the Department of
Energy's
Ames Laboratory to leverage the NVIDIA GPUs.
In addition to deploying a small local GPU cluster, the university team will also
look to scale its
work using the NCSA Lincoln cluster, where the computational output has been boosted
to 47 TeraFLOPS through the addition of Tesla S1070 1U GPU systems.
For more information:
Video of the Temple University
team discussing their work in surfactant research
Molecular dynamics
using GPUs
Institute for Computational Molecular
Science at Temple University
The HOOMD application from Ames
Lab
NCSA Supercomputer
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (
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consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive
graphics. Expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel
processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune
magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two
years in a row. For more information, see
www.nvidia.com
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