SCIENCE INDEX 2000 2001 2002 Biology

Illinois' NAMD code among the winners at the Olympics of supercomputing

Jim Barlow, Life Sciences Editor
(217) 333-5802; b-james3@uiuc.edu

12/4/02

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — NAMD, a molecular dynamics code for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems developed at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, was among the winners of this year’s Gordon Bell Awards – the Olympics of supercomputing – at the SC2002 conference held in November in Baltimore.

NAMD was recognized for unprecedented parallel performance on a challenging computational problem. NAMD and its sister visualization program VMD helped Illinois scientists discern how plants harvest sunlight, how muscles stretch and how kidneys filter water.

NAMD – developed in collaboration by computer scientists Laxmikant Kale, Robert M. Skeel and lead programmer James C. Phillips – represents a marriage of crosscutting research with software development, aimed at harnessing the nation’s fastest supercomputers to decipher the tiny components of living cells.

NAMD derives its parallel performance from the Charm++ framework developed at Kale’s Parallel Programming Laboratory. It is distributed free of charge to thousands of scientists in industry and academia around the world, quickening the pace of drug discovery and other vital research to unravel biological processes.

NAMD was developed by the Theoretical Biophysics Group, directed by physicist Klaus Schulten, at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology with support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

The Gordon Bell Awards were established in 1988 to stimulate future advances in parallel computing applications by recognizing major accomplishments.