Tripos, Inc. and Silicon Graphics recently announced a record-making event-- SpaceCrunch. The joint project demonstrates how the union of high-performance scaleable supercomputing and leading edge chemical database technology can fundamentally change the drug discovery process. The SpaceCrunch project involves creating a structural database containing over 100 billion compounds, and provides capabilities to search and manipulate the database at rates above 100 million compounds per hour per CPU. The technology for building and searching the database comes from Tripos' ChemSpace(TM), a patented methodology for the creation and management of chemical databases. The power to build and search the database is provided by the scalable computing power of Silicon Graphics computer systems. The SpaceCrunch project is running on a POWER CHALLENGE at the Silicon Graphics Supercomputing Technology Center in Cortaillod, Switzerland. What does this mean to you? Anyone with an internet browser can participate in SpaceCrunch, although Java is needed for full interactive capability. During the next two months, you can access SpaceCrunch through URL http://spacecrunch.sgi.ch or URL http://www.tripos.com/spacecrunch. The event will consist of two phases, during the initial period (October 28 to November 11) visitors may find out more about the project and may propose molecular structure queries to be applied to the full database. The second phase, in early December, will be a live event in which visitors will interactively examine and explore the results of queries that were selected for running against the database. You can participate in the world's first public applications of this groundbreaking new technology. Combinatorial Chemistry and High Throughput Screening are new disciplines in which large chemical compound libraries are designed, created and tested for desired biological activity. The one-by-one screening method used currently is being replaced by these new technologies. The design and evaluation process of library building has been performed up until now on a small scale. Now, ChemSpace and Silicon Graphics Technology brings innovation to this process by enabling the creation and searching of vast libraries containing billions of chemical compounds stemming from specific reactions and reagents. ChemSpace is unique in enabling both the construction of massive medicinal databases and the ability to search them for specified similarity or chemical substructures. The ChemSpace technology is scalable across the entire Silicon Graphics line of products, from the entry-level Indy desktop workstation to the top-of-the-line POWER CHALLENGEarray as well as on the recently announced product line extending from the O2 desktop solution, through ORIGIN200 and up to the ORIGIN2000 scalable solutions. Visit the web sites to learn more about ChemSpace and Silicon Graphics technology and to submit a query to be one of those possibly selected to run against the SpaceCrunch database. Contact Mark Schwartz of Tripos (314-647-1099, schwartz@tripos.com) or Heidi Taylor of Silicon Graphics (+44 1734 257500, heidi@reading.sgi.com) for additional information. mac Malcolm A Cline Tripos WebMaster ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)