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BioExcel Update

Rossen Apostolov, PDC

BioExcel has been busy during the spring! The BioExcel software engineering teams are passionate about creating effective, usable, high-performance software for life sciences research. They have distilled that knowledge into guidelines  useful for all teams developing software for science.

As many of our applications and tools are being used by industry (in particular in the pharmaceutical branch), BioExcel has begun a series of site visits to companies to share expertise and understand the needs of researchers using our offerings. In March, we visited the Janssen research and development site  in Belgium.

Pharmaceutical companies use BioExcel software for virtual screening and discovery of novel drug molecules.

Over the last couple of months, BioExcel has produced a great line up of webinars! We presented the latest developments of the MARTINI Force Fiel d and a sleek new web server for structural/dynamical studies of DNA . Our industrial (and also academic) users might find the methods and tools developed by BiKi Technology  very interesting and useful, as well as successful early hit optimization by Novartis  using HADDOCK, amongst other tools. And, if you have not tried GROMACS 2018 yet, you really should check out Mark Abraham's overview of its new features and capabilities , which is sure to change your mind! Coming up next is a presentation by BioExcel's collaborators from the Pistoia Alliance's AbVance project .

The 2018 Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) conference is being held in Basel in July. It is a great venue for computational scientists in all domains, including the life sciences. BioExcel is running a dedicated mini-symposium on “Advances and Automation for the Exascale Era”  together with our partners from MolSSI . If you are coming to the conference, make sure to join us or drop by our exhibition booth. Another important event is the BioExcel 2nd SIG Meeting: “Advanced Simulations for Biomolecular Research”  during the 17th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2018). This year’s conference is being co-organized with our partners from Vi-SEEM VRE . We have a great line-up of speakers, including a keynote by Jean-Pierre Changeux . So hurry up and send off your abstract for a poster! We are offering a number of travel bursaries (up to 500 euro)  to successful candidates!