Professors Ken Houk, Yi Tang, and colleagues have won HPCwire’s 2014 Reader’s Choice Award for the “Best Use of HPC (High-performance computing) Application in Life Sciences”.
HPCwire.com: Every year, HPCwire conducts their annual Readers’ Choice Awards to recognize the best and the brightest developments that happened in HPC over the last 12 months. These awards, which are nominated and voted on by the global HPC community are announced and presented during the annual Supercomputing Conference, this year being held in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Ken Houk and Yi Tang
[Prof. Houk, Prof. Tang], and colleagues at UCLA have been recognized for their use of Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer for biomolecular simulation at the [Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)], to improve the utility of LovD, an enzyme critical in the synthesis of the cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. The current synthesis requires a second protein, LovF, making the process less efficient and difficult to scale for industrial production. Lab experiments and long-timescale molecular dynamics simulations on Anton helped identify mechanisms behind LovD mutations that make LovF unnecessary. Additional work to produce an industrial-grade product is currently in progress.
