James Phillips

Senior Research Programmer, NAMD Development, 1999-present
Bringing Computing to Life (what we do)
Bringing Physics to Life (what our users do)

Fellow, NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence, 2008-present
Ph.D., Physics, 2002, University of Illinois
Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, 1995-1999
Fannie and John Hertz Graduate Fellowship, 1994-1995
M.S., Physics, 1994, University of Illinois
B.S., Physics and Math, 1993, Marquette University

Office: 3141 Beckman Institute
Email: jim at ks dot uiuc dot edu

Publications List (also on Google Scholar)
Presentations List

Research Interests

NAMD: Scalable Molecular Dynamics

NAMD, recipient of a 2002 Gordon Bell Award and acceptance test for the Blue Waters sustainted petascale computing system, is a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. NAMD scales to thousands of processors on high-end parallel platforms and tens of processors on commodity clusters using gigabit ethernet. NAMD has been downloaded by over 37,000 people and is used for virtually every biomolecular research project in our group.

I have been the lead developer for NAMD since version 2.0, released in 1998, and began as a full-time research programmer in 1999. I am responsible for implementing many of the numerical methods and performance-critical force evaluation routines in NAMD, and ensuring that the released software is reliable and efficient. I work closely with our computer science collaborators to maintain and improve the parallel performance of NAMD on a variety of platforms, including graphics processors. I also interact on a daily basis with biomedical researchers using NAMD to study the biophysical properties of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids.

Older Work

Modeling of High Density Lipoproteins

MDTools for Python

Visualizing Global Datasets with IRIS Explorer