Using FPGA Devices to Accelerate Biomolecular Simulations

Abstract

A field-programmable gate array implementation of the particle-mesh Ewald 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.