Grant was given by the Intel Corporation for the use of technology in university education and research in fields ranging from electrical engineering to journalism. Research at Duke University addresses four computationally demanding application areas for Intel Architecture hardware and related technology, namely computational medicine and biology, computer and network architecture, nuclear theory, and innovative computer science education. The goal of the medicine and biology research is to develop five compatible local development networks complemented by a larger centralized production facility of Intel Architecture computers to directly compare their performance with current UNIX based systems in the simulation and subsequent analysis of large scale computational problems in medicine.
Biomolecular simulation is a tool made possible by the advent of high performance computing.
It permits biochemists and biophysicists to understand how and why biologically important molecules behave the way they do. Computer simulation is often the only tool that can be used to gain insight into the structure and thereby the microscopic function of the biologic molecule. One of the key challenges facing computer architects is the increasing discrepancy between processor cycle times and main memory access time. Technological advances have enabled the implementation of microprocessors with clock cycle times of a few nano-seconds. Although caches satisfy most memory references, for fast processors the penalty of cache misses can be a significant portion of total execution time.