46 TFLOPS special-purpose computer for molecular dynamics simulations: WINE-2

We developed WINE-2, a 46 TFLOPS computer, to accelerate molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We need a huge computational power to understand the dynamics of large and complex molecules such as those of proteins and nucleic acids. WINE-2 is a specialized computer to accelerate the wavenumber-space part of the Ewald (1921) summation for calculating the Coulomb forces among atoms. It has a highly parallel architecture and is composed of 2,304 WINE-2 chips. We measured 29 TFLOPS of performance in the case of 24 million atoms and a half million wavenumber vectors. This sustained speed is more than seven times faster than the peak speed of the fastest supercomputer in the world.