The upper figure shows the known structure of the protein crambin from the Brookhaven Protein Data Base (PDB), and the lower figure is the best selection from a large ensemble of candidate chains, generated on a fcc (face-centered cubic) lattice using a guided replication Monte Carlo chain generation algorithm. Development of the algorithm and its serial and parallel implementations was funded by the HPCC Program. The three-dimensional structure prediction procedure was benchmarked at about 6 minutes on a 500- node Intel Paragon versus 24 hours on a single-processor IBM RS6000 workstation, a 225-fold speedup. |