Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have achieved a major breakthroughin the battle to fight the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) using NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU accelerators, NVIDIA today announced. Featured on the cover of the latest issue of Nature, the world’s most-cited interdisciplinary science journal, a new paper details how UIUC researchers collaborating with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have, for the first time, determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV "capsid," a protein shell that protects the virus’s genetic material and is a key to its virulence. Understanding this structure may hold the key to the development of new and more effective antiretroviral drugs to combat a virus that has killed an estimated 25 million people and infected 34 million more.
UIUC researchers uncovered detail about the capsid structure by running the first all-atom simulation of HIV on the Blue Waters Supercomputer. Powered by 3,000 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators – the highest performance, most efficient accelerators ever built – the Cray XK7 supercomputer gave researchers the computational performance to run the largest simulation ever published, involving 64 million atoms.
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