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Publication
Communications of the ACM
Review
PETAFLOPS computing
Abstract
The use of PetaFLOPS Computers, which can assist in the functioning of biological molecules, is discussed. The important aspects for PetaFLOPS computing systems to study biological phenomena are money, physical aspects of providing electricity and cooling for very large systems and the algorithms needed to create programs that will run effectively on such computers. PetaFLOPS employs different strategies from those employed in the design of most large supercomputers such as Blue Gene project and Molecular Dynamics Machine (MDM). The MDM research team recorded an effective speed of 8.61TeraFLOPS in May 2001 and since then has performed large-scale simulations of biomolecules with a million atoms.