The Nano Simbox: using virtual reality to interactively steer scientific simulations on high-performance computational architectures
Session ChairWu Feng
Contributors
Event Type
Emerging Technologies
TimeWednesday, November 16th10am - 6pm
Location155-B
DescriptionDevelopments in consumer gaming (e.g. general-purpose graphical processing units, or GP-GPUs) have played an important role in accelerating progress in scientific simulation and visualization. In this Emerging Technologies Showcase, we will demonstrate how the latest in video gaming technologies may be harnessed to accelerate HPC progress in scientific simulation. The "Nano Simbox" is a molecular research tool that exploits the latest in commodity virtual reality (VR), enabling a user to interactively steer real-time, research-grade biomolecular simulations run on a GPU-accelerated HPC back-end architecture. The simulation environment we will demo has been specifically designed for high-end commodity VR hardware like the HTC Vive, allowing users to intricately steer 3d simulations. The Nano Simbox allows users to interface with HPC capabilities in a way that has never before been possible, and opens up a powerful new paradigm for tackling the sorts of hyper-dimensional search problems often encountered in scientific simulation.
