The University of Tsukuba in Japan has equipped its Highly Accelerated Parallel Advanced System for Computational Sciences (HA-PACS) with more than one thousand Nvidia GPUs to accelerate research astrophysics, bio-physics, life sciences and other scientific fields.
Housed at Tsukuba’s Center for Computational Science, the HA-PACS system has been updated with 1,072 Nvidia Tesla M2090 GPUs, delivering a theoretical peak performance of 802 teraflops, making it one of the three top performing supercomputers in Japan. Astrophysics researchers will use GPU-accelerated simulations to better understand how stars and galaxies were formed and to study the evolutionary path of the universe.
In biophysics, researchers plan to couple molecular dynamics and quantum mechanics techniques to analyse the reaction mechanisms of enzymes and the dynamic properties of DNA-protein complexes. GPU acceleration will enable researchers to conduct simulations on a scale that was previously unachievable, such as longer simulations of larger, more complex systems. A deeper scientific understanding of the biological behaviour of disease will provide new insights into how drug candidates may impact specific diseases.
