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|                   NAMD 2.6 Release Announcement                    |
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                                                     August 31, 2006

The Theoretical and Computational 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 2.6 has several advantages over NAMD 2.5:

- Ports to Itanium, Altix, and Opteron/Athlon64/EMT64.

- Port to Mac OS X for Intel processors.

- Ports to Cray XT3 and IBM BlueGene/L (source code only).

- Improved serial performance, especially on POWER and PowerPC.

- Adaptive biasing force free energy calculations.

- Customizable replica exchange simulations.

- Tcl-based boundary potentials.

- Reduced memory usage for unusual simulations.

- Support for CHARMM 31 stream files and CMAP crossterms.

- Support for OPLS force field.

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 and Computational 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!

