We are pleased that Jens Meiler and his research team will be competing in CASP, a large-scale community experiment, conducted every two years. CASP8 will run from May through July 2008. The key feature is that participants make bona fide blind predictions of protein structures. Over 200 prediction teams from 24 countries participated in CASP7. Information about soon-to-be experimentally determined protein structures is collected and passed on to registered predictors. Over 30,000 predictions for 64 protein targets divided into 90 domains were collected and evaluated. Predictors fall into two categories: teams of participants who devote considerable time and effort to modeling each target, usually having a period of several weeks to complete their work; and automatic servers, which must return a model within 48 hours, in principle without human intervention. The Meiler laboratory is participating in the former experiment.

The Meiler lab has a large fairshare on the ACCRE cluster and in addition will be bursting thoughout this three month period. ACCRE staff work with users to allow burst usage and to accommodate special needs and have been able to do so in the past without negatively impacting other groups. We anticipate that wait times will periodically increase during this three month period but we will be actively monitoring cluster usage and working with all users to ensure their research is completed on a timely basis.

Please feel free to submit a ticket to the ACCRE helpdesk if you have problems during this period. If you know in advance of any special needs and/or deadlines for the cluster during this period of time, please contact Carie Lee Kennedy.

Thank you for your continuing support of ACCRE and other Vanderbilt researchers.

ACCRE Staff