On August 3, a delegation from Huawei headed by the company’s VP Ai Wei visited SZBL. SZBL scientist Gao Yiqin and his group members met with the guests. The two parties held a discussion over the co-development of molecular dynamics simulation software under AI framework.

Yang Yi, a SZBL associate research fellow in the Gao Yiqin group at SZBL Institute of Systems and Physical Biology (ISPB), made a presentation to update the research of the cooperation.Yang first provided an overview on the existing molecular dynamics (MD) simulation and related technical limitations, and then introduced MindSponge, a AI-driven molecule simulation framework that goes open source recently. As a newly developed MD framework, MindSponge comes from the combination of the Huawei MindSpore framework and Sponge, an open source MD software designed and produced by an ISPB research group from the ground up.

Through cooperation, the group hopes to take advantages of the MindSpore framework and the Huawei Ascend to improve the running of MD programme under AI framework and further optimize molecular mechanics force fields, and to eventually achieve meta-optimization and end-to-end differentiable in MindSponge.

At the end of the meeting, a recap on the significance of further co-developing MindSponge was given. Attendees also extended hopes for the cooperation. Project members from SZBL side including Zhang Yun, Wang Qin, and Wang Yingjie attended the meeting.