mD3DOCKxb: An Ultra-Scalable CPU-MIC Coordinated Virtual Screening Framework

Molecular docking is an important method in computational drug discovery. In large-scale virtual screening, millions of small drug-like molecules (chemical compounds) are compared against a designated target protein (receptor). Depending on the utilized docking algorithm for screening, this can take several weeks on conventional HPC systems. However, for certain applications including large-scale screening tasks for newly emerging infectious diseases such high runtimes can be highly prohibitive. In this paper, we investigate how the massively parallel neo-heterogeneous architecture of Tianhe-2 Supercomputer consisting of thousands of nodes comprising CPUs and MIC coprocessors that can efficiently be used for virtual screening tasks. Our proposed approach is based on a coordinated parallel framework called mD3DOCKxb in which CPUs collaborate with MICs to achieve high hardware utilization. mD3DOCKxb comprises a novel efficient communication engine for dynamic task scheduling and load balancing between nodes in order to reduce communication and I/O latency. This results in a highly scalable implementation with parallel efficiency of over 84% (strong scaling) when executing on 8,000 Tianhe-2 nodes comprising 192,000 CPU cores and 1,368,000 MIC cores.