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Ontario Tech acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation.

We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

Learn more about Indigenous Education and Cultural Services

March 28, 2014

Speaker: Peter Colberg, Chemical Physics Theory Group, University of Toronto

Title: Ångström-Scale Chemically-Powered Motors Propelled With OpenCL on GPUs

Abstract: Molecular machines are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in the biological cell, where they pump ions across membranes or transport cargo through the cell among many other functions. Synthetic chemically-powered motors mimic their biological role models using asymmetric catalytic activity to generate concentration gradients that lead to self-propulsion. Their motion in solution is influenced by thermal fluctuations and long-range hydrodynamic interactions.

We study Ångström-scale chemically-powered motors using full molecular dynamics simulations. Unlike nano-scale micron-size motors, Ångström-scale motors are comparable in size to the surrounding solvent molecules. Using a self-written molecular dynamics code we simulate solvent structure, solvent flow fields and long-time dynamics for a self-propelled sphere-dimer motor.

In this talk I will give an overview of the parallel algorithms used for the simulation, which are simple yet in combination form a powerful program. The computational kernels are written in OpenCL C and, using the same code across all devices, achieve satisfactory run times on multi-core CPUs and excellent run times on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.