THE GPU REVOLUTION
LAUREN K. WOLF · Chemical & Engineering News · 2010
THREE YEARS can pass in a flash for most chemical research projects—and often without yielding three years’ worth of useful data. Experiments take time: Techniques need to be carefully developed, conditions tweaked, problems overcome, and promising results verified. Patient chemists involved in the 10- to 15-year drug discovery process can attest to this. But for computational chemistry, the past three years have released a torrent of data. A revolution in how molecular simulations are carried out is now making it possible for theorists to do speedy desktop calculations that rival those of supercomputers. And it’s all thanks to the video-game market. Consumer demand for lifelike avatars and interactive scenery at a reasonable price have pushed computer firms to come up with relatively inexpensive, yet sophisticated, graphics hardware. Called a graphics processing unit (GPU), this hardware is responsible for three-dimensional images in games. Unlike the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer, which might have a ...