High performance computing with coarse grained model of biological macromolecules

Abstract

The Unified Coarse Grained Model of biological macromolecules (UCGM) that is being developed in our laboratory is a model designed to carry out large-scale simulations of biological macromolecules. The simplified chain representation used in the model allows to obtain 3-4 orders of magnitude extention of the time-scale of simulations, compared to that of all-atom simulations. Unlike most of the other coarse-grained force fields, UCGM is a physics-based force field, independent of structural databases and applicable to treat non-standard systems. In this communication, the efficiency and scalability of the new version of UCGM package with Fortran 90, with two parallelization levels: coarse-grained and fine-grained, is reported for systems with various size and oligomeric state. The performance was tested in the canonical- and replica exchange MD mode, with small- and moderate-size proteins and protein complexes (20 to 1,636 amino-acid residues), as well as with large systems such as, e.g., human proteosome 20S with size over 6,200 aminoacid residues, which show the advantage of using coarse-graining. It is demonstrated that, with using massively parallel architectures, and owing to the physics-based nature of UCGM, real-time simulations of the behavior of subcellular systems are feasible.