CCDC’s GOLD Application to Be Integrated into Altair Engineering’s PBS Professional
Grid technology will manage HPC workload in the study of drug candidates binding to proteins.
TROY, Mich., (July 18, 2006) - Altair Engineering, Inc., a leading global provider of technology and services that strengthen client innovation and decision-making, today announced that it has formed a partnership with the Cambridge Crystallographic Centre (CCDC) to integrate their GOLD molecular docking application into Altair’s PBS Professional grid technology. The partnership will ensure PBS Professional’s ongoing support of GOLD to manage the high-performance computing (HPC) requirements of this program for calculating docking modes of small molecules into protein binding sites. PBS Professional provides the ability to launch and monitor a variety of jobs, including single GOLD jobs, multiple sequential GOLD jobs using PBS Job Arrays, as well as parallel GOLD jobs leveraging parallel virtual machine (PVM).
The CCDC, located on the Chemistry campus of the University of Cambridge in England, is a non-profit, charitable institution whose objectives are the general advancement and promotion of the sciences of chemistry and crystallography. It serves the scientific community through the acquisition, evaluation and dissemination of crystal structure information. GOLD was created as a result of collaboration between the University of Sheffield (England), GlaxoSmithKline plc and CCDC.
"GOLD is very highly regarded within the molecular modeling community for its accuracy and reliability," said Dr. Stephen Salisbury, CCDC business director. "Integrating it with Altair’s PBS Professional will ensure that the application runs at optimal efficiency for our customers who chose PBS Professional as their grid software provider. That is particularly meaningful for scientists in academia and industry who depend on reliable access to great amounts of computing power to complete their research."
PBS Professional is an open workload management solution for HPC environments. The software maximizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload in a number of industries. By increasing the efficiency of the hardware and software resources, PBS Professional reduces total cost of ownership and provides true business value to grid computing customers.
"Supporting CCDC’s GOLD application is precisely the type of work PBS Professional was designed to do," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair’s PBS GridWorks business unit. "Pharmaceutical companies have realized that grid computing can be an important source of competitive advantage in drug development and research. Integrating with GOLD is an important step in allowing our life science customers to increase the speed and scope of their research."
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About CCDC
The CCDC is a not-for-profit company situated on the University of Cambridge's Chemistry Campus. The Center was founded in 1965 to record the results of small molecule crystal structure analyses. The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) was one of the first numerical databases created anywhere in the world and now contains more than 370,000 structures. The CCDC also develops software for accessing the CSD, knowledge bases of structural information, and applications software that uses crystal structure information to solve problems in structural chemistry and the life sciences. Products are used widely in basic research in structural chemistry, rational molecular design and pharmaceutical development. To learn more, please visit
www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/.
About PBS GridWorks
PBS GridWorks provides a suite of technologies that allows enterprise clients to maximize their ROI on computing assets through policy-based grid technology. The suite includes OpenPBS, PBS Professional, e-Compute and Scali Manage. PBS GridWorks products and services are widely deployed within a number of industries, including manufacturing, government, academia, life sciences, energy, digital media and finance. Altair’s mature partner network ensures seamless integration and ease of deployment.
About Altair Engineering
Altair Engineering, Inc. strengthens client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held with more than 800 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 20-year-plus track record for product design, advanced engineering software and grid computing technologies, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, please visit
www.altair.com.