Since the introduction of the scanning tunnelling microscope (stm) as a tool for experiments in nanotechnology, much research has been done on topics such as molecular electronics and atomic...Show moreSince the introduction of the scanning tunnelling microscope (stm) as a tool for experiments in nanotechnology, much research has been done on topics such as molecular electronics and atomic surfaces. Recently, a program was developed that simulates the motion of a system consisting of a gold substrate and gold adatoms, under influence of an stm tip, through Newtonian molecular dynamics. Since the program was aimed at assisting stm experiments, it needed the ability to simulate a sample with a tip in real-time, thus demanding high performance. In this project, we work on the extension of the simulation to a new type of stm experiment, which involves an organic molecule in addition to the gold elements. The more complex nature of such systems, however, makes these simulation severely more computation heavy; this is a serious problem that has to be addressed. In our quest of speeding up the program, we reimplement certain algorithms on a graphics processing unit (gpu), with the Cuda gpu programming framework.Show less
