APPLICATIONS

Grid technology will manage HPC workloads for molecular modeling and cheminformatics: Altair Engineering today announced that it has formed a partnership with OpenEye Scientific Software to integrate several of OpenEye's applications with Altair's PBS Professional grid technology. The partnership will ensure that applications such as FRED, Omega and ROCS run efficiently with PBS Professional. Joint customers will benefit from an enhanced ability to solve complex research problems more quickly and efficiently by distributing their computational workload across a grid managed by PBS Professional. OpenEye provides molecular modeling and cheminformatics software to the pharmaceutical industry. FRED is a leading protein-ligand docking program that exhaustively scores all possible positions of each ligand in the active site. Omega is a general purpose conformer-generation program that is specifically designed for use with the large libraries required for computer-aided drug design. ROCS is a shape-comparison program that enables large-scale 3D database searches and finds similar but non-intuitive compounds. These programs, combined with PBS Professional, allow scientists to rapidly analyze huge libraries of molecules. "We are pleased to have our software integrated with PBS Professional," said Dr. Mathew Stahl, senior vice president and head of Strategic Development for OpenEye Software. "Having the speed and flexibility to manage and process massive amounts of drug development and research data is essential to the success of life science companies. This integration with PBS Professional will give our customers a great option for the effective use of their computational resources." PBS Professional is an open workload management solution for high- performance computing (HPC) environments. The software maximizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload. 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 in a variety of industries. "Working with innovative software companies like OpenEye allows us to provide the solutions that the life science customers are seeking," said Dr. Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer of Altair's PBS GridWorks business unit. "Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have realized that grid computing can be an important source of competitive advantage in drug development and research."