NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Help Combat H1N1 Virus

NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Help Combat H1N1 Virus

NVIDIA recently announced the launch of the Kepler-based NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPU. The Tesla K10 GPU is able to deliver 4.58 teraflops of single high precision performance and has a memory bandwidth of 320GB/s in a single accelerator. This means the Tesla K10 has 12 times higher single precision flops and 6.4 times higher memory bandwidth than the latest Sandy Bridge CPUs.

In light of the amount of performance this GPU is capable of, Tesla GPUs are now being used to identify ways to combat drug-resistant H1N1 virus mutations. A major difficulty in combating H1N1 is the frequent and rapid mutation of the virus, rendering anti-influenza drugs ineffective.

Using computers powered by Tesla K10 GPUs, researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK, and the Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat and Chulalongkorn Universities in Bangkok have been able to observe how the H1N1 mutations can cause changes in the chemical and biological structure of the virus, revealing the mechanism of resistance to existing anti-influenza drugs.

Sumit Gupta, Senior Director of the Tesla Business at NVIDIA said, “Until now, the use of computer simulations for drug discovery and disease prevention has been limited because of the large, expensive supercomputers required to study the biological systems. Today, a small affordable GPU-based server gives researchers dedicated access to high-performance system in-house to power a range of scientific discovery.”

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