[Beowulf-announce] NAMD 2.2b2 Release Announcement

[Jim Phillips]

Hi,

NAMD uses latency-tolerant algorithms, making it ideal for Beowulf-class
machines.  (It runs pretty well on the Cray T3E too.)  This is the first
release to include support for Windows NT (98 etc. are untested), not to
imply that anyone on the Beowulf list would be interested in that.

-Jim


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|                  NAMD 2.2b2 Release Announcement                   |
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                                                   September 15, 2000

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 2.2b2 has several advantages over NAMD 2.1:

- New ports to the IBM RS/6000 SP and Windows NT.

- Parallelized particle mesh Ewald FFT and reciprocal space sum
  with demonstrated scaling to 128 processors for large systems.

- Release binaries contain FFTW (under special license) for
  better serial performance when using particle mesh Ewald.

- Much faster minimizer based on conjugate gradient method, also
  more stable when dealing with very bad initial contacts.

- Improved load balancer with demonstrated scaling to over
  1024 processors for large cutoff systems.

This is a beta release!  Please be on the lookout for bugs, memory
leaks, and instabilities of all kinds and report them immediately.

NAMD is available from http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/.

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 at ks.uiuc.edu.

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