Simbios
 

Simbios Talk by Pat Hanrahan, Stanford University, May 16, 2006

Title: Simulation on highly parallel architectures

Abstract: In the future the classic microprocessor will be replaced with a highly parallel chip multiprocessor. Conventual CPUs will have many cores; graphic processors (GPUS) will have hundreds of floating point units; new architectures like Cell will also become ubiquitous. This talk will review recent developments in these areas and their impact on SimBIOS. I will also report on joint work with V. Pande, E. Darve and A. Lew. For example, we have recently implemented an nbody code that runs 40x faster on the ATI 580 than on a P4. Similar speedups have been realized with HMMER (hidden markov models) and mechanics code. The software and hardware has developed to the point where we can now impact the basic science.