A field-programmable gate array implementation of a molecular dynamics simulation method reduces the microprocessor time-to-solution by a factor of three while using only high-level languages. The application speedup on FPGA devices increases with the problem size. The authors use a performance model to analyze the potential of simulating large-scale biological systems faster than many cluster-based supercomputing platforms.
Index Terms:
reconfigurable computing, FPGAs, Biomolecular simulations
Citation:
Sadaf R. Alam, Pratul K. Agarwal, Melissa C. Smith, Jeffrey S. Vetter, David Caliga, "Using FPGA Devices to Accelerate Biomolecular Simulations," Computer, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 66-73, Mar. 2007, doi:10.1109/MC.2007.108