July 2, 2001

The Theoretical Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois is proud to announce the public release of a new version of NAMD, a parallel, object-oriented molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. NAMD is distributed free of charge and includes source code. NAMD development is supported by the NIH National Center for Research Resources.

NAMD 2.3b2 has several advantages over NAMD 2.2:

- AMBER file compatibility (parm and coordinate input only).

- The new psfgen tool for building PSF structure files.

- Simpler to run on a single workstation. (No more rsh!)

- New ports to the Compaq AlphaServer SC and Scyld Beowulf.

- Improved serial performance, particularly with PME on Alpha.

NAMD is available from http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/.

For your convenience, NAMD has been ported to and will be installed on both the PSC TCS1 Alpha cluster and the NCSA Platinum Linux cluster. Please mention NAMD when you apply for time on these new resources.

The Theoretical Biophysics group encourages NAMD users to be closely involved in the development process through reporting bugs, contributing fixes, periodical surveys and via other means. Questions or comments may be directed to namd@ks.uiuc.edu.

We are eager to hear from you, and thank you for using our software!