Colloquium - Crivelli

Understanding the principles by which proteins fold, associate, and cooperatively function are major challenges in biology that will allow scientists to gain insight into the mechanisms of life. To understand those principles, scientists need to manage large-scale simulations of biological systems; these simulations require not only powerful hardware but also innovative software that allows studying, analyzing, and modeling protein, complex and cell structure and function in a dynamic way. Such software must bring together high-performance parallel computing, human-computer interaction, and innovative algorithm design.

My goal is to develop a new generation of steering, exploration, and visualization tools for biological applications powerful enough to handle the complexity of the biological problems at hand and to allow the level of human intervention that is needed to integrate human knowledge, experiments, and intuition into the simulation process. A first step in that direction is ProteinShop, a cutting-edge interactive, graphical environment for protein modeling developed by my group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. ProteinShop enables users to monitor and steer a protein structure prediction process while it runs on a remote parallel computer. In this talk, I will discuss the protein simulation process, the graphical environment, and some outstanding issues involved in this truly multidisciplinary research.

Hosted by Elizabeth Jessup.
The speaker is a candidate for a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science.