April 18, 2002

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 2.5b1 has several advantages over NAMD 2.4:

- Improved constant pressure simulation and coordinate wrapping.

- Additional parameters can be changed during a simulation script.

- Fixes to AMBER parm file reader for AMBER 7 or large molecules.

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

For your convenience, NAMD has been ported to and will be installed on the machines at the NSF-sponsored national supercomputing centers. If you are planning substantial simulation work of an academic nature you should apply for these resources. Benchmarks for your proposal are available at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/performance.html

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!