Library

Description: \small Many interesting phenomena in molecular systems like interactions between macro-molecules, protein-substrate docking, or channeling processes in membranes are gouverned to a high degree by classical Coulomb or van-der-Waals forces. The visualization of these force fields is important for verifying numerical simulations. Moreover, by inspecting the forces visually we can gain deeper insight into the molecular processes. Up to now the visualization of vector fields is quite unusual in computational chemistry. In fact many commercial software packages do not support this topic at all. The reason is not that vector fields are considered unimportant, but mainly because of the lack of adequate visualization methods. In this paper we survey a number of methods for vector field visualization, ranging from well-known concepts like arrow or streamline plots to more advanced techniques like line integral convolution, and show how these can be applied to computational chemistry. A combination of the most meaningful methods in an interactive 3D visualization environment can provide a powerful tool box for analysing simulations in molecular dynamics.

Description: The structures and interaction energies of guanine and uracil quartets have been determined by B3LYP hybrid density functional calculations. The total interaction energy $\Delta$E$^{T}$ of the $\it{C}$$_{4h}$-symmetric guanine quartet consisting of Hoogsteen type base pairs with two hydrogen bonds between two neighbour bases is -66.07 kcal/mol at the highest level. The uracil quartet with C6-H6...O4 interactions between the individual bases has only a small interaction energy of -20.92 kcal/mol and the interaction energy of -24.63 kcal/mol for the alternative structure with N3-H3...O4 hydrogen bonds is only slightly more negative. Cooperative effects contribute between 10 and 25 \% to all interaction energies. Complexes of metal ions with G-quartets can be classified into different structure types. The one with Ca$^{2+}$ in the central cavity adopts a $\it{C}$$_{4h}$-symmetric structure with coplanar bases, whereas the energies of the planar and non-planar Na$^{+}$ complexes are almost identical. The small ions Li$^{+}$, Be$^{2+}$, Cu$^{+}$ and Zn$^{2+}$ prefer a non-planar $\it{S}$$_{4}$-symmetric structure. The lack of co-planarity prevents probably a stacking of these base quartets. The central cavity is too small for K$^{+}$ ions and therefore this ion favours in contrast to all other investigated ions a $\it{C}$$_{4}$-symmetric complex, which is 4.73 kcal/mol more stable than the $\it{C}$$_{4h}$-symmetric one. The distance 1.665 {\AA} between K$^{+}$ and the root mean squares plane of the guanine bases is approximately half of the distance between two stacked G-quartets. The total interaction energy of alkaline earth ion complexes exceeds the ones with alkali ions. Within both groups of ions the interaction energy decreases with an increasing row position in the periodic table. The B3LYP and BLYP methods lead to similar structures and energies. Both methods are suitable for hydrogen-bonded biological systems. Compared with the before mentioned methods the HCTH functional leads to longer hydrogen bonds and different relative energies for two U-quartets. Finally we calculated also structures and relative energies with the MMFF94 forcefield. Contrary to all DFT methods, MMFF94 predicts bifurcated C-H...O contacts in the uracil quartet. In the G-quartet the MMFF94 hydrogen bond distances N2-H22...N7 are shorter than the DFT distances, whereas the N1-H1...O6 distances are longer.

Description: Seit fast drei Jahren betreibt das Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB) Parallelrechner der höchsten Leistungsklasse im normalen Rechenzentrumsbetrieb. Bereits im Mai 1995 hat das ZIB über seine Erfahrungen mit dem damals leistungsstärksten Parallelrechner Deutschlands berichtet. Das Gesamtkonzept des ZIB sieht weiterhin einen Höchstleistungsrechner als unabdingbaren Bestandteil des High Performance Scientific Computing (HPSC) im ZIB vor. Der vorliegende Bericht beschreibt die aktuelle Konfiguration, Betriebserfahrungen und die Rechnernutzung sowie typische Rechenleistungen, die für einzelne Anwendungsprogramme erzielt wurden. Beschreibungen der Forschungsgebiete mit den Forschungsgruppen, die den Rechner nutzen und die Anforderungen an den Rechnerausbau, die sich aus deren Arbeiten herleiten, beschließen den Bericht.

Description: THESEUS, the ZIB threading environment, is a parallel implementation of a protein threading based on a multi-queued branch-and-bound optimal search algorithm to find the best sequence-to-structure alignment through a library of template structures. THESEUS uses a template core model based on secondary structure definition and a scoring function based on knowledge-based potentials reflecting pairwise interactions and the chemical environment, as well as pseudo energies for homology detection, loop alignment, and secondary structure matching. The threading core is implemented in C++ as a SPMD parallization architecture using MPI for communication. The environment is designed for generic testing of different scoring functions, e.g. different secondary structure prediction terms, different scoring matrices and information derived from multiple sequence alignments. A validaton of the structure prediction results has been done on the basis of standard threading benchmark sets. THESEUS successfully participated in the 6th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) 2004.