Fast CUDA-Based Triangulation of Molecular Surfaces

Abstract

Modeling molecular surfaces enables us to extract useful information about interactions with other molecules and measurements of areas and volumes. Over the years many types of algorithms have been developed to represent and rendering molecular surfaces, but all these algorithms have problems related to time performance in triangulating molecular surfaces. One possible solution to solve this problem is using parallel computing systems, but until recently they have been very expensive. Fortunately, the appearance of the new generation of low-cost GPUs with massive computational power opens up an opportunity window to solve this problem. So, in this paper, we present a GPU-based algorithm to speed up the triangulation and rendering of molecular surfaces. Besides we carry out a study that compares a sequential version (CPU) and a parallel version (GPU) of a molecular surface representation using the Marching Cubes (MC) Algorithm.