Dear Consortium Members and Affiliates,
How's it going? We're doing well here at SBGrid and enjoying some fine Spring weather here in Boston. We just finished up our second annual structural biology computing conference, and it was a resounding success. We had some outstanding presentations from our speakers demonstrating new and upcoming features in iMosflm, SHARP/autoSHARP, PHENIX, CCP4mg and more. Feedback from our attendees was very positive, and we're already starting to plan next year's event, which will be sponsored by EMBO and held in Heidelberg, Germany. We're very excited.
Due to the increasing frequency of update requests and the regular release schedules of some of our major software packages, we are considering moving to a weekly update schedule. The current plan is to do a smaller update two to three times per month on Tuesdays, rather than the larger single monthly release which typically happens on Wednesdays. If you have an opinion about this proposal that you'd like to share, please email bene@crystal.harvard.edu. Providing there is not a strong dissent to such a proposal, we'll move to this new update schedule in June.
We have a small update for you today, but it includes some major packages and new features. This update includes new versions of CCP4, PHENIX, XIA2, VMD, XDS and the new XDS-Viewer.
In the pipeline for future updates, we have XPLOR, XMIPP, IMOD, CCP4mg, Rosetta and CS-Rosetta, NMRViewJ, APBS, Modeller and a fistful of software from the Pyle Lab at Yale. Drop us a line if you have any additions or just to chat.
The following software updates will be available today:
Linux and Mac OS X (PPC and Intel)
CCP4 has been updated to version 6.1.1 with patches for all known problems applied. These patches include new versions of refmac and molrep.
PHENIX version 1.4-59 has been installed. This is a nightly build that includes the new PHENIX graphical interface. Run 'phenix2' from the command line to start the new interface. Note that at the advice of the PHENIX developers, this version has not been set as the default version.
To enable this beta PHENIX version, create a file at ~/.sbgrid with a version override like this:
setenv PHENIX_L 1.4-59
The PHENIX_L shell variable will override the default version setting for the Linux version of PHENIX. To override the default OS X version, use the setting PHENIX_M. More information on overriding default versions for software can be found on our wiki.
The CCI Apps have been removed from the software suite as their functionality has been replaced by the PHENIX nightly beta builds.
XIA2 has been updated to version 0.3.0.0. This version is compatible with the latest XDS and now includes multi-threading for faster performance on multi-core CPUs.
XDS was updated in early April to address the situation with expired binaries. The current binaries are valid until December 2009.
XDS-Viewer is a new open source application by the XDS developers that replaces some of the image viewing functionality that was originally in XDS.