James C. Phillips and John E. Stone.
Probing biomolecular machines with graphics processors.
Communications of the ACM, 52:34-41, 2009.
PHIL2009-JS
Computer simulation has become an integral part of the study of the structure and
function of biological molecules. For years, parallel computers have been used to conduct
these computationally demanding simulations and to analyze their results. These
simulations function as a “computational microscope,” allowing the scientist to observe
details of molecular processes too small, fast, or delicate to capture with traditional
instruments. Over time, commodity GPUs (graphics processing units) have evolved into
massively parallel computing devices, and more recently it has become possible to
program them in dialects of the popular C/C++ programming
languages.
