Running on a machine at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana, the program calculated how each of the million or so atoms in the virus and a surrounding drop of salt water was interacting with almost every other atom every femtosecond, or millionth of a billionth of a second.
The team managed to model the entire virus in action for 50 billionths of a second. Such a task would take a desktop computer around 35 years, says Schulten. "This is just a first glimpse," he says. "But it looks gorgeous."
