Highlights of our Work
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made with VMD
Viruses reproduce by splicing their genetic material into a host cell,
causing the cell to manufacture new viruses.
This genetic material is protected outside of the host cell by a protein
capsid, which disassembles inside a new cell to complete the infection process.
Simulation of viral infection
has progressed significantly since the
first all-atom virus simulation
was done with NAMD in 2006 and is one of the
driving biomedical projects for the software.
A new collaboration with the
Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions
has applied molecular dynamics flexible fitting
to construct the first all-atom structure of an HIV virus capsid in its
tubular form (shown).
This structure is now being simulated as one of six
early science projects
on the
Blue Waters petascale supercomputer
being installed at Illinois.
These large-scale simulations are enabled by the
2.9 release
of NAMD, which includes a new high-performance
interface to the Cray Gemini network of Blue Waters.
Smaller simulations may also leverage petascale computing through a new
replica-exchange framework that supports parallel tempering and integrates
with the collective variables module for umbrella sampling conformational
free energy calculations.
GPU acceleration
enhancements include minimization and implicit solvent support as well
as exploitation of shared memory, extending performance gains to the desktop.