Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Process Engineering (CAS-IPE) announced that they have used the world's fastest supercomputer to run a molecular simulation to examine potential improvements in the production of crystalline silicon.

The researchers used Tianhe-1A to perform a simulation on NVIDIA Corporation (Santa Clara, California, U.S.) Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) that modeled the behavior of 110 billion silicon atoms.

"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 CAS-IPE Research Associate Dr. Wenlai Huang.

"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."

Research to be presented at conferences in San Jose, California, Beijing

Researchers state that the simulation offered five times the performance and more than twice the size of the previous highest-performing molecular simulation, which modeled 49 billion atoms.

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.

Members of the CAS-IPE team will present their research at the GPU Tech Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, U.S., May 14th-17th, 2012 and at GTC China December 15th-16th, 2011 in Beijing.