China Employs GPU Computing for Solar Energy Industry

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer was covered in a previous blog post about China becoming a GPGPU supercomputing superpower, and they’ve been using the world’s most powerful supercomputer to perform molecular simulation in a new effort to improve the production of crystalline silicon, a vital material commonly used to build solar panels.

Tianhe-1A Supercomputer

“These scientists are simulating the structure of crystalline silicon which is used in solar panels and in the semiconductor industry,” explained NVIDIA spokesman Andrew Humber.

This approach continues a long-term trend of China developing world-class design capability as a foundation for continued growth in their manufacturing sector.

Beyond the raw GPU computing power of China’s Tianhe-1A, NVIDIA’s CUDA toolkit played an important role in achieving the world’s fastest MD simulation using NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Writing just 2,000 lines of CUDA code, researchers working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Process Engineering (CAS-IPE) achieved a 5x performance increase over the previous record for molecular simulation.

“Computer simulations are critical to the study of new materials and production methods as it can reveal far more details than experimental measurements, at much less cost,” said Dr. Wenlai Huang, research associate at CAS-IPE. “The levels of performance we achieved by using all 7,168 NVIDIA GPUs in the Tianhe-1A supercomputer enabled us to run simulations that come closer than ever to reproducing the behavior of the material in different aspects and its true bulk properties under different conditions, which are more meaningful for engineering and industrial purposes.”

While we can’t compete with the Tianhe-1A, Trenton’s membership in the NVIDIA Tesla Preferred Partner program allows us to create customer-driven, long-life GPU Computing solutions that will satisfy computationally intensive applications in Government & Defense, Video Processing, Medical Research and Energy Management markets. Call us with your requirements at 770.287.3100.