Thursday, May 30th 2013
NVIDIA Tesla Powers HIV Research Breakthrough
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have achieved a major breakthrough in the battle to fight the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) using NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, NVIDIA today announced.
Featured on the cover of the latest issue of Nature, the world's most-cited interdisciplinary science journal, a new paper details how UIUC researchers collaborating with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have, for the first time, determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV "capsid," a protein shell that protects the virus's genetic material and is a key to its virulence. Understanding this structure may hold the key to the development of new and more effective antiretroviral drugs to combat a virus that has killed an estimated 25 million people and infected 34 million more.
UIUC researchers uncovered detail about the capsid structure by running the first all-atom simulation of HIV on the Blue Waters Supercomputer. Powered by 3,000 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators -- the highest performance, most efficient accelerators ever built -- the Cray XK7 supercomputer gave researchers the computational performance to run the largest simulation ever published, involving 64 million atoms.
"It would have been very difficult to run a simulation of this size without the power of GPU-accelerated supercomputing in the Blue Waters system," said Klaus Schulten, professor of physics at the University of Illinois. "We started using GPU accelerators more than five years ago, and GPUs have fundamentally accelerated the pace of our research."
Designed to accelerate a broad range of scientific and technical computing applications, NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators are enabling researchers worldwide to make dramatic new breakthroughs across a variety of scientific domains -- including alternative energy, astrophysics, drug development, and climate research, among others. They deliver significantly higher performance and better energy efficiency as compared with CPU-based systems.
"GPUs help researchers push the envelope of scientific discovery, enabling them to solve bigger problems and gain insight into larger and more complex systems," said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Business Unit at NVIDIA. "Blue Waters and the Titan supercomputer, the world's No. 1 open science supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs, are just two of many GPU-equipped systems that are enabling the next wave of real-world scientific discovery."
Capsid May Be Key to More Effective Drugs
With the planned addition of more GPUs to the Blue Waters system, UIUC researchers expect to increase simulation times, providing additional insight into the structure and behavior of the HIV capsid.
The capsid has become an attractive target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs, largely due to the discovery that Rhesus monkeys have developed an immunity to HIV through a protein that disrupts capsid functioning.
The capsid is the protein cell of a virus, containing the virus's genetic material. It protects and "smuggles" the genetic material into the human host cell. Once inside, it uncoats the material and initiates the infection.
No existing HIV drug treatments are designed to target the capsid. However, by providing a better understanding of the structure of the HIV capsid, pharmacologists have a wealth of new information to develop new and potentially more effective antiviral HIV drugs.
Featured on the cover of the latest issue of Nature, the world's most-cited interdisciplinary science journal, a new paper details how UIUC researchers collaborating with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have, for the first time, determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV "capsid," a protein shell that protects the virus's genetic material and is a key to its virulence. Understanding this structure may hold the key to the development of new and more effective antiretroviral drugs to combat a virus that has killed an estimated 25 million people and infected 34 million more.
"It would have been very difficult to run a simulation of this size without the power of GPU-accelerated supercomputing in the Blue Waters system," said Klaus Schulten, professor of physics at the University of Illinois. "We started using GPU accelerators more than five years ago, and GPUs have fundamentally accelerated the pace of our research."
Designed to accelerate a broad range of scientific and technical computing applications, NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators are enabling researchers worldwide to make dramatic new breakthroughs across a variety of scientific domains -- including alternative energy, astrophysics, drug development, and climate research, among others. They deliver significantly higher performance and better energy efficiency as compared with CPU-based systems.
"GPUs help researchers push the envelope of scientific discovery, enabling them to solve bigger problems and gain insight into larger and more complex systems," said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Business Unit at NVIDIA. "Blue Waters and the Titan supercomputer, the world's No. 1 open science supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs, are just two of many GPU-equipped systems that are enabling the next wave of real-world scientific discovery."
Capsid May Be Key to More Effective Drugs
With the planned addition of more GPUs to the Blue Waters system, UIUC researchers expect to increase simulation times, providing additional insight into the structure and behavior of the HIV capsid.
The capsid has become an attractive target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs, largely due to the discovery that Rhesus monkeys have developed an immunity to HIV through a protein that disrupts capsid functioning.
The capsid is the protein cell of a virus, containing the virus's genetic material. It protects and "smuggles" the genetic material into the human host cell. Once inside, it uncoats the material and initiates the infection.
No existing HIV drug treatments are designed to target the capsid. However, by providing a better understanding of the structure of the HIV capsid, pharmacologists have a wealth of new information to develop new and potentially more effective antiviral HIV drugs.
66 Comments on NVIDIA Tesla Powers HIV Research Breakthrough
As always, useless. A way one can cure itself of this disease , and many more other is allready known for millenia. This is just another example of how todays resources are used just for the sake of it, just because we can.
Its called drinking your own urine !
Simple, anyone can do it, it doesnt cost anything, and you dont need to know the structure of the virus to make it work. The body works its wonders alone, while you sit on your ass and play world of warcraft.
But like anything in this fucked up society, if it doesnt make profit, its not promoted.
As you have read, this new knowledge is being used to be able to manufacture: '' new and potentially more effective antiviral HIV drugs ".
Profit profit and more profit.
They dont give a fuck on curing people. Its all about profit !
Another example would be the so called folding teams, where people gather togther theyr PCs computing power to solve some other medical problems, also just for the sake of it.
Im sick of this just when im thinking about it.
It's all about profit? You will make a lot more profit owning a hotel, a restaurant owner, or any sort of business. Yet these people have devoted half their life studying medicine, to work in a field where they SAVE PEOPLES LIVES. And here you come screaming 'profit, profit'.
It seems like YOU are the one who sits in front of the PC and plays games, rather than ever having worked in a company before. Profit is simply the way of saying 'what I am doing is appreciated by someone' or 'someone finds my product/service useful'.
And bytales, that is a bit of a crappy attitude.
Of course big pharmaceuticals want to make maximum ill gotten profit (you can do some googling about how they created 'depression' as an illness in Japan and saw their anti-depressant sales soar) but there is a line in the sand.
There are many whacko, crack jobs that say AIDS and HIV can be readily cured by 'piss' or Vitamin C but the hard facts are that there are many not for profit research organisations also fighting the disease and if it was as easy as drinking piss then these good people would have cracked it.
It's also really weird how lunatics with their own little world hate agendas against science use science (the digital tech of the internet) to spread their unintelligent (sometimes faith driven) dire opinions upon the rational majority.
Well, Bytales, I would not wish it upon you normally but if you would be so kind as to go and contract HIV and hence prove to us that drinking your own piss cures you, that would be lovely. Of course nothing is stopping you from saying that is exactly what has happened to you already, such is the allure of the unchecked lie machine of the web.
@Bytales:
I do think this is a good thing Nvidia equipment has been used for.
people in the 'know' knew HIV/AIDS was a US government engineered diseased developed in the 80s used for population control, they had the cure since day one, billions of dollars has been "dumped" into these so called "research" for what? if they wanted you to have the cure you would have it, the fact is a cure isn't meant to be found and all these useless research isnt going to do squat. all these marketing bullshit just to make a profit. Cmon people, when will you wake the f**k up.
Food for thought: ever wonder what's actually keeping the population of lets say, majority of African nations in check, you got it, HIV. (well among with famine and other nasty things)
a slow and painless murder is called population control, otherwise, its just called murder.
I was simply pointing out the fact that what are they doing is a simple waste of human and energy resources, the way they tackled the problem. They trying to find a cure for something that is already curable, granted, but is not common knowledge.
And its not they're fault really. Such knowledge (that drinking urine can cure a lot of ilness for which modern medicine tells are there are no cures , and i am not referring only to this, there a ton more examples along this line)that is being systematically suppressed, and stupidly enforced by people such as yourself (who don't bother to make the smallest research in this regard, and choose to ridicule it the first chance they got), is and will still be the cause of much human suffering.
I could comment a lot more on this subject, but this is not the place to comment such things.
If you ask me, that's much more important than some bullshit PR. People matter more.
Agenda 21 MoFo's!You could combine every single PC used for distributed computing and it still would not equate to a single super computer.:laugh:
One word: Tesla.
:(