Tsinghua University School of Medicine was founded on 25 October 2001. It is now widely recognized worldwide that life sciences and medicine are among the most active fields of science and technology, and among those most likely to achieve critical breakthroughs. The school was founded on that basis. Establishing the school was an extremely important step for Tsinghua to meet national development needs and world trends in higher education and science and technology, and to advance toward a world-class university. To help Tsinghua rank among world-class universities before 2011, university leadership clearly set the strategic goal of “striving for breakthroughs in information, nano, and life sciences.”

Because research involves large data volumes that require an HPC cluster, Sugon equipped dual-socket nodes and eight-socket large-memory nodes, providing an overall peak of 6.6 trillion operations per second. Sugon also performed application-specific optimization, raising efficiency by 10%–28%. After completion, the system mainly serves the following two applications:

Scanning electron-microscope data processing: the SEM is indispensable in life-science research. An extremely fine electron beam scans the sample surface to obtain raw data, which software then purifies and analyzes. Secondary electrons are collected by a dedicated detector, formed into electrical signals, sent to a display tube, and shown on a fluorescent screen as a three-dimensional surface image of the object (cells, tissue), then photographed to obtain information within the human cognitive range. Main computing software includes spider and eman.

Molecular-dynamics simulation: molecular dynamics is a molecular-simulation method that, based on defined interatomic potentials, uses Newtonian mechanics to simulate motion of molecular systems, exploring kinetic and thermodynamic properties. It is of great importance for revealing the essence of life and studying the activities of living organisms. Main application software includes NAMD and others.