Hardware Accelerated Molecular Docking: A Survey

Hardware acceleration is the general concept of applying a specialized hardware for a given problem instead of an ordinary CPU in order to get lower processing time. General purpose CPUs can be considered as a totally general platform suitable for executing virtually any software or algorithm. Application specific accelerators have a custom architecture that fits the needs of a certain family of algorithms. As a consequence, they are able to outperform CPUs by orders of magnitude in a special application area but they are unfit for other, more general tasks. In contrast to normal CPUs, which are essentially serial machines executing instructions sequentially, hardware accelerators use parallel architectures which allow them to exploit the parallelism available in the given application by performing independent operations simultaneously.