Solving Molecular Distance Geometry Problems in OpenCL
Electronics and Computers Department, Transilvania University, Brasov, Romania
13th International Conference on Optimization of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (OPTIM’2012), 2012
We focus on the following computational chemistry problem: Given a subset of the exact distances between atoms, reconstruct the three-dimensional position of each atom in the given molecule. The distance matrix is generally sparse. This problem is both important and challenging. Our contribution is a novel combination of two known techniques (parallel breadth-first search and geometric buildup) and its OpenCL parallel implementation. The approach has the potential to speed up computation of three-dimensional structures of molecules – a critical process in computational chemistry. From experiments on multi-core CPUs and graphic processing units, we conclude that, for sufficient large problems, our implementation shows a moderate scalability.
June 27, 2012 by hgpu