Nvidia has launched Tesla Bio Workbench, which helps scientists involved in biological research by turning a standard PC into a 'computational laboratory' capable of running complex bioscience codes in fields such as drug discovery and DNA sequencing more than 10-20 times faster through the use Nvidia Tesla GPUs.
The Tesla Bio Workbench consists of a range of GPU-optimised bioscience applications for molecular dynamics- and quantum chemistry-based research, including: Amber, Gromacs, LAMMPS, NAMD, TeraChem, VMD, and bioinformatics applications like CUDASW++ (Smith-Waterman), GPU-HMMER, and MUMmerGPU.
It also features a community site for downloading the applications, checking out the latest benchmarks, reading academic papers and tutorials, joining discussion forums with the application developers themselves and more.
Scientists have traditionally performed experiments in laboratories, where chemicals are combined, their interactions studied and their effectiveness measured. Advances in computational science have now enabled these experiments to be carried out using molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry simulation models, however these have typically required very large supercomputers with thousands of central processing units (CPUs).
By using the massively parallel Cuda architecture of Nvidia GPUs, these applications can now be run 10-20 times faster, which means even a PC with Tesla GPUs can outperform a supercomputer.
