March 11, 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 2.4 has several advantages over NAMD 2.3:

- Greatly improved parallel scaling with particle mesh Ewald.

- Locally enhanced sampling via multiple non-interacting images.

- Alchemical free energy perturbation for mutation, ligands, etc.

- GROMACS ASCII topology and coordinate input file compatibility.

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!