Using an application called NAMD, running on a 1,024 processor Silicon Graphics computer with 3 Terabytes of RAM called Cobalt, two graduate students and a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have successfully simulated a living organism at the atomic level. This is something that has never been done before.

The organism that they’ve simulated is a very small plant virus called the satellite mosaic tobacco virus. The idea behind this all is to be able to study viruses or bacteria and conduct experiements for cures and such all inside a virtual environment. They say that on the latest desktop based computer hardware, this simulation would have taken until 2041 to complete. On Cobalt, it was finished in 10 days.

Image courtesy of NCSA and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Using an application called NAMD, running on a 1,024 processor Silicon Graphics computer with 3 Terabytes of RAM called Cobalt, two graduate students and a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have successfully simulated a living organism at the atomic level. This is something that has never been done before.

The organism that they’ve simulated is a very small plant virus called the satellite mosaic tobacco virus. The idea behind this all is to be able to study viruses or bacteria and conduct experiements for cures and such all inside a virtual environment. They say that on the latest desktop based computer hardware, this simulation would have taken until 2041 to complete. On Cobalt, it was finished in 10 days.

Image courtesy of NCSA and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign