GPU-Accelerated High-Accuracy Molecular Docking using vGuided Differential Evolution

摘要

The objective in molecular docking is to determine the best binding mode of two molecules in silica. A common application of molecular docking is in drug discovery where a large number of ligands are docked against a protein to identify potential drug candidates. This is a computationally intensive problem especially if flexibility of the molecules are taken into account. In this paper we show how MolDock, which is a high accuracy method for flexible molecular docking using a variant of differential evolution, can be parallelised on both CPU and GPU. The methods presented for parallelising the workload result in an average speedup of 3.9x on a 4-core CPU and 27.4x on a comparable CUDA enabled GPU when docking 133 ligands of different sizes. Furthermore, the presented parallelisation schemes are generally applicable and can easily be adapted to other common flexible docking methods.