6,402 research outputs found
Tackling Exascale Software Challenges in Molecular Dynamics Simulations with GROMACS
GROMACS is a widely used package for biomolecular simulation, and over the
last two decades it has evolved from small-scale efficiency to advanced
heterogeneous acceleration and multi-level parallelism targeting some of the
largest supercomputers in the world. Here, we describe some of the ways we have
been able to realize this through the use of parallelization on all levels,
combined with a constant focus on absolute performance. Release 4.6 of GROMACS
uses SIMD acceleration on a wide range of architectures, GPU offloading
acceleration, and both OpenMP and MPI parallelism within and between nodes,
respectively. The recent work on acceleration made it necessary to revisit the
fundamental algorithms of molecular simulation, including the concept of
neighborsearching, and we discuss the present and future challenges we see for
exascale simulation - in particular a very fine-grained task parallelism. We
also discuss the software management, code peer review and continuous
integration testing required for a project of this complexity.Comment: EASC 2014 conference proceedin
Computational structure‐based drug design: Predicting target flexibility
The role of molecular modeling in drug design has experienced a significant revamp in the last decade. The increase in computational resources and molecular models, along with software developments, is finally introducing a competitive advantage in early phases of drug discovery. Medium and small companies with strong focus on computational chemistry are being created, some of them having introduced important leads in drug design pipelines. An important source for this success is the extraordinary development of faster and more efficient techniques for describing flexibility in three‐dimensional structural molecular modeling. At different levels, from docking techniques to atomistic molecular dynamics, conformational sampling between receptor and drug results in improved predictions, such as screening enrichment, discovery of transient cavities, etc. In this review article we perform an extensive analysis of these modeling techniques, dividing them into high and low throughput, and emphasizing in their application to drug design studies. We finalize the review with a section describing our Monte Carlo method, PELE, recently highlighted as an outstanding advance in an international blind competition and industrial benchmarks.We acknowledge the BSC-CRG-IRB Joint Research Program in Computational Biology. This work was supported by a grant
from the Spanish Government CTQ2016-79138-R.J.I. acknowledges support from SVP-2014-068797, awarded by the Spanish Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Molecular dynamics recipes for genome research
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation allows one to predict the time evolution of a system of interacting particles. It is widely used in physics, chemistry and biology to address specific questions about the structural properties and dynamical mechanisms of model systems. MD earned a great success in genome research, as it proved to be beneficial in sorting pathogenic from neutral genomic mutations. Considering their computational requirements, simulations are commonly performed on HPC computing devices, which are generally expensive and hard to administer. However, variables like the software tool used for modeling and simulation or the size of the molecule under investigation might make one hardware type or configuration more advantageous than another or even make the commodity hardware definitely suitable for MD studies. This work aims to shed lights on this aspect
High-throughput Binding Affinity Calculations at Extreme Scales
Resistance to chemotherapy and molecularly targeted therapies is a major
factor in limiting the effectiveness of cancer treatment. In many cases,
resistance can be linked to genetic changes in target proteins, either
pre-existing or evolutionarily selected during treatment. Key to overcoming
this challenge is an understanding of the molecular determinants of drug
binding. Using multi-stage pipelines of molecular simulations we can gain
insights into the binding free energy and the residence time of a ligand, which
can inform both stratified and personal treatment regimes and drug development.
To support the scalable, adaptive and automated calculation of the binding free
energy on high-performance computing resources, we introduce the High-
throughput Binding Affinity Calculator (HTBAC). HTBAC uses a building block
approach in order to attain both workflow flexibility and performance. We
demonstrate close to perfect weak scaling to hundreds of concurrent multi-stage
binding affinity calculation pipelines. This permits a rapid time-to-solution
that is essentially invariant of the calculation protocol, size of candidate
ligands and number of ensemble simulations. As such, HTBAC advances the state
of the art of binding affinity calculations and protocols
Wireless network control of interacting Rydberg atoms
We identify a relation between the dynamics of ultracold Rydberg gases in
which atoms experience a strong dipole blockade and spontaneous emission, and a
stochastic process that models certain wireless random-access networks. We then
transfer insights and techniques initially developed for these wireless
networks to the realm of Rydberg gases, and explain how the Rydberg gas can be
driven into crystal formations using our understanding of wireless networks.
Finally, we propose a method to determine Rabi frequencies (laser intensities)
such that particles in the Rydberg gas are excited with specified target
excitation probabilities, providing control over mixed-state populations.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures; includes corrections and improvements from the
peer-review proces
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