U of Washington Dynameomics Project Awarded 2M Processor-Hours on DOE Supercomputer

NEW YORK, Dec. 22 (GenomeWeb News) - The US Department of Energy said today that it has awarded a protein-folding project at the University of Washington 2 million processor-hours under its INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) initiative.

The award will support a project called "Molecular Dynameomics" at the university, which aims to create a repository of the molecular dynamics structures for protein folds, including the unfolding pathways. According to the University of Washington researchers, there are approximately 1,130 known, non-redundant protein folds, of which they have simulated about 30 so far.

The project was one of three that the DOE awarded under its INCITE program this year, which doled out a total of 6.5 million hours of supercomputing time. The other two awards were for combustion simulation and astrophysics research.

The researchers will have access to a 6,656-processor 7.3-teraflop IBM supercomputer at the DOE's NationalEnergyResearchScientificComputingCenter in Berkeley, Calif. The three awards amount to 15 percent of NERSC's annual computing resources, the DOE said.

The three projects were selected out of 23 proposals submitted to the 2005 INCITE program.