SCIENCE

Microway’s GPU Computing Solutions with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs were awarded the prestigious Best New Technology award at the Life Sciences Technology Insight Summit in Boston yesterday. A uniquely comprehensive educational and executive summit, the event featured a multitude of case study presentations and interactive panels from executives from leading life sciences organizations and industry associations.

Attendees interacting with Microway representatives saw a stunning 3D display of DNA pulled through a synthetic nanopore, driven by NAMD software running on Microway’s WhisperStation- PSC (personal supercomputer). The WhisperStation included two NVIDIA Tesla C2070 GPUs and Quadro 6000 graphics using NVIDIA’s 3D Vision Pro technology.

Two of Microway’s customers presented case studies on their research and implementation of Microway Tesla GPU-based computational platforms in drug discovery and cancer treatment.

Dr. Preston Moore, of University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, demonstrated how Microway WhisperStations and clusters with Tesla GPUs enabled accelerated understanding of the physicochemical properties of biological membranes. Dr. Moore’s research is leading to new drug discovery and increased understanding of membrane interaction.

Dr. John Wolfgang of Massachusetts General Hospital presented a case study success on “SHADIE: A Quantitative, GPU-based Volume Rendering Solution for Radiation Oncology.” Running on Microway WhisperStation-Tesla PSC and remote NVIDIA Tesla S-Series GPU servers, MGH is now able to treat cancer patients using live radiotherapy visualization. They can also provide immediate estimates of patient radiation exposure under the conditions of any specified shader. Both applications would have been impossible to implement with only CPU-based computational power.

"Computational biochemistry enables researchers to quickly sort through large databases of biomolecules and drug candidates," said Sumit Gupta, Tesla product line manager at NVIDIA. "Microway's award-winning WhisperStation-LS uses the performance of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to accelerate these bioscience applications to rapidly advance scientific research."

Microway's Tesla solutions for life sciences are delivered fully integrated with CUDA SDK and Linux or Windows. In April, Microway’s BioStack-LS cluster was awarded Best of Show at the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston. WhisperStations and BioStack-LS clusters offer advanced manageability features that have been refined over years of development and thousands of real-world cluster deployments.

“Molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, visualization/rendering, and bioinformatics applications are particularly well suited for massive parallelism. With speedups exceeding 10x on many applications, scientists can leverage Tesla GPUs to achieve smaller footprints with increased computational power. Microway’s Tesla-based WhisperStation and computational clusters are the ideal foundation for this accelerated research," commented Stephen Fried, Microway's President and CTO.

A complete product description can be found at http://www.microway.com/tesla