NAMD

NAMD, recipient of a 2002 Gordon Bell Award, is a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large molecular systems. NAMD is developed by the Theoretical Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois. NAMD scales to hundreds of processors on high-end parallel platforms and tens of processors on commodity clusters using switched fast Ethernet. NAMD computes atomic trajectories by solving the equations of motion numerically using empirical force fields, such as the Amber, CHARMM and Dreiding, that approximate the actual atomic force. NAMD was initially designed for simulation of biomolecular systems. The introduction of the Dreiding force field in NAMD by Scienomics enables scientists in the polymers field to benefit from NAMD's high performance and carry out molecular dynamics computations in order to predict the dynamical behavior and important properties such as diffusion coefficients, cohesive energies, etc. NAMD is designed to run efficiently on parallel machines for simulating large molecules. NAMD is particularly well suited to the increasingly popular Beowulf-class PC clusters, which are quite similar to the workstation clusters for which it was originally designed.

NAMD in MAPS^®