Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Meeting the Ethanol Challenge: Scientists Use Supercomputer to Target Cellulose Bottleneck

From UC SanDiego:
"Termites and fungi already know how to digest cellulose, but the human process of producing ethanol from cellulose remains slow and expensive."

The simulations took 80,000 processor hours (32 hours on a 2500+CPU system).

The SDSC DataStar is a big time supercomputer, #68 on the University of Mannheim/University of Tennessee list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.

This cellulosic biofuel stuff is not going to come fast. Or cheap.