NVIDIA today announced that Chinese researchers achieved a major breakthrough in the race to battle influenza by using NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs to create the world’s first computer simulation of a whole H1N1 influenza virus at the atomic level.

Researchers at the Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS-IPE) are using molecular-dynamics simulations as a “computational microscope” to peer into the atomic structure of the H1N1 virus(1). Using the Mole-8.5 GPU-accelerated supercomputer, which includes more than 2,200 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, researchers were able to simulate the whole H1N1 influenza virus, enabling them to verify current theoretical and experimental understandings of the virus.