News

Media contact:
Greg Lund, SDSC Communications, 858-534-8314 or greg@sdsc.edu
Ashley Wood, SDSC Communications, 858-534-8363 or awood@sdsc.edu

On Nov. 2, the San Diego Supercomputer Center's (SDSC) Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory released the first public version of GEMSTONE (Grid Enabled Molecular Science Through Online Networked Environments). This cross-platform desktop application provides users access to remote grid services specific to chemical and biochemical applications.

Built from the Mozilla foundation codebase and available as a Firefox extension, Gemstone provides automatic updates of new releases. It is capable of providing a versatile desktop user interface to strongly typed web services for applications running in distributed cluster computing environment. The user interface allows a user to save and reuse application parameters, provides drag and drop capability on multiple platforms and supports server-side dynamic user interface configuration update.

The initial version includes support for Adaptive Poisson-Boltzmann Solver (APBS), Babel, and access to the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The APBS Web Service is developed by the National Biomedical Compute Resource and hosted on a cluster using the Rocks cluster environment. Security for the APBS Web Service is possible using Grid Account Management Architecture (GAMA) using Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) authentication.

More information on downloading and using GEMSTONE can be found at http://grid-devel.sdsc.edu/gemstone. Additional information on GAMA and APBS Web Service are available online. Please contact Kim Baldridge or Karan Bhatia for additional questions or comments.

GEMSTONE is funded by the National Science Foundation through the NSF Middleware Initiative through grant #SCI-0438430. It's developed in close collaboration with NBCR, funded by the National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health and the Baldridge Research Group at the University of Zurich.

About SDSC
In 2005, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) celebrates two decades of enabling international science and engineering discoveries through advances in computational science and high performance computing. Continuing this legacy into the era of cyberinfrastructure, SDSC is a strategic resource to academia and industry, providing leadership in Data Cyberinfrastructure, particularly with respect to data curation, management and preservation, data-oriented high-performance computing, and Cyberinfrastructure-enabled science and engineering. SDSC is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego and one of the founding sites of NSF's TeraGrid. For more information, see www.sdsc.edu.