Calgary, Alberta (OBBeC) - Tycrid Platform Technologies, a provider of supercomputing platforms, has unveiled that Titan, their debut workstation, has achieved record performance results, for a standalone workstation, running VMD, a molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing large biomolecular systems using 3-D graphics and built-in scripting.

VMD includes a multiple sequence alignment plugin, a unified bioinformatics analysis environment that allows users to organize, display, and analyze both sequence and structure data for proteins and nucleic acids.

VMD was used by Tycrid due to it’s support for NVIDIA’s CUDA toolkit, and ability to efficiently scale to multiple GPUs in a single system. The direct Coulomb summation algorithm implemented in VMD is fully GPU optimized with almost linear scaling across multiple GPUs.

“In tests we published in a recent research paper, a single Tesla card outruns a single Intel QX6700 CPU core by a factor of 44,” said John Stone, lead developer of VMD. “The 6 GPU run achieves 228 billion atom evaluations per second, a single QX6700 CPU core can only achieve 0.9 billion. This results in a 253x speedup versus a single CPU core, a very large performance gain even relative to 8 or 16 CPU cores.”

“These results, pushing upwards around 1.7 TFLOPS, are very encouraging for multi GPU processing in general,” said Chris Heier, President of Tycrid Platform Technologies. “This has shown excellent opportunity for massively dense GPU computing platforms. Researchers in molecular dynamics can essentially have the power of a decent sized computing cluster under their desk with Titan.”