Advancing Flu Virus Research with GPUs

A modern twist on a World War II combat method is aiding the fight against the deadly Ebola virus — and could help avoid a catastrophic influenza pandemic.

Eric Jakobsson from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Amir Barati Farimani from Stanford University, took their inspiration from the Blitz, and the randomly determined automatic firing patterns of anti-aircraft guns to protect London from German war planes. They’ve used similar stochastic algorithms, powered by GPUs, to develop multiple simulated molecular models that predict which antibodies would best combat certain strains of Ebola.

Keeping up with the evolution of Ebola, which mutates every three to four years, is difficult. Trying to outmaneuver influenza, which mutates every three to four months, is another story. Yet that’s just the challenge the research team intends to take on after Ebola.

Blast from the past: Randomized anti-aircraft firing patterns have inspired molecular simulation research.

Read the entire article here, Advancing Flu Virus Research with GPUs

via the fine folks at NVIDIA.