May 19, 2011

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 2.8b3 has many advantages over NAMD 2.7, among these are:

- Generalized Born implicit solvent model

- Accelerated molecular dynamics method

- MARTINI residue-based coarse-grain forcefield

- Non-uniform grids in grid forces

- Symmetry and domain restraints

- Collective variables module improvements

- Force output and trajectory files

- Shared-memory single-node and multiple-node builds

- Measurement-based grain-size adjustment in load balancer

- Experimental memory-optimized version with parallel I/O

- Microsoft Windows HPC Server port and released binaries

- Support for NBFIX parameters in CUDA builds

- Enhanced performance and scalability

Details at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/2.8/features.html

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!