From: biocore_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Date: Fri Mar 30 2001 - 13:26:32 CST

Urbana, Illinois - The Theoretical Biophysics Group at the
University of Illinois is proud to announce the latest updates to the
BioCoRE web-based collaborative research environment. Since the
initial release in March of 2000, we have added significant new
features, as well as many minor improvements and features suggested
by our users.

The following features are the most important additions to the
BioCoRE environment.

+ Job submission and monitoring. BioCoRE now allows you to submit
NAMD simulation jobs to your computer accounts on the PSC T3E and the
NCSA Origin 2000. After submitting jobs through BioCoRE, you may
check back to see whether they have run, and view the output of the
jobs as they run. Soon we will be adding a graphical viewer applet
for NAMD jobs, and support for more computer systems and applications.

+ A Java-based Control Panel. This control panel starts up when you
first log in to BioCoRE, and provides several convenient features.
The control panel provides a cross-project view of all your projects,
so you can easily find which projects have changed recently. You can
also determine at a glance who else is currently logged in to your
projects. The control panel also provides a live chat capability, and
notifies you with color and an alert sound when new information is
added to any of your projects.

+ Storing (publishing) molecular visualization views (from VMD) to
the BioCoRE notebook. Now, when you launch VMD through BioCoRE you
will be presented with an additional window that allows you to
publish a molecular state to BioCoRE. Later, any member of your
project may retrieve that view from the Message Board. In the
Message Board you can select `Saved VMD Sessions' from the drop-down
box and choose a published state that you wish to view. Currently
this feature is only supported on Unix versions of VMD, but this will
soon be available on more platforms. We also have many interesting
features planned.

For additional information, or to obtain a BioCoRE account, please
visit the BioCoRE website at
<http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/biocore/>.

The Theoretical Biophysics group encourages BioCoRE 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 biocore_at_ks.uiuc.edu.

We are eager to hear from you, and thank you for using our software!