Researchers achieve highest performing molecular simulation

As part of ongoing efforts to find more efficient production techniques for crystalline silicon – a key material used in solar panels and the semiconductor industry –researchers used Tianhe-1A (pictured), the world's fastest supercomputer, to perform a simulation on Nvidia Tesla GPUs that was five times the performance and more than twice the size of the previous record. According to Dr Wenlai Huang, research associate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Process Engineering, the simulation modelled the behaviour of 110billion atoms at 1.87 petaflops of performance, beating the previous record of 49bn atoms at 369 teraflops of performance. "The levels of performance we achieved by using all 7,168 Nvidia GPUs in the Tianhe-1A supercomputer enabled us to run simulations that come closer than ever to reproducing the behaviour of the crystalline silicon in different aspects," said Dr Huang. "We were also able to identify the materials true bulk properties under different conditions, which are more meaningful for engineering and industrial purposes."