Parallel computing and molecular dynamics of biological membranes

In this talk I discuss the general question of the portability of Molecular Dynamics codes for diffusive systems on parallel computers of the APE family. The intrinsic single precision of the today available platforms does not seem to affect the numerical accuracy of the simulations, while the absence of integer addressing from CPU to individual nodes puts strong constraints on possible programming strategies. Liquids can be satisfactorily simulated using the "systolic" method. For more complex systems, like the biological ones at which we are ultimately interested in, the "domain decomposition" approach is best suited to beat the quadratic growth of the inter-molecular computational time with the number of atoms of the system. The promising perspectives of using this strategy for extensive simulations of lipid bilayers are briefly reviewed.