Title:Soft Computing Techniques for the Protein Folding Problem on High Performance Computing Architectures
Volume: 17
Issue: 14
Author(s): Antonio Llanes, Andrés Muñoz, Andrés Bueno-Crespo, Teresa García-Valverde, Antonia Sánchez, Francisco Arcas-Túnez, Horacio Pérez-Sánchez and José M. Cecilia
Affiliation:
Keywords:
Soft computing, protein folding problem, protein structure prediction, parallel computing, distributed computing,
metaheuristics, high performance computing.
Abstract: The protein-folding problem has been extensively studied during the last
fifty years. The understanding of the dynamics of global shape of a protein and the influence
on its biological function can help us to discover new and more effective
drugs to deal with diseases of pharmacological relevance. Different computational approaches
have been developed by different researchers in order to foresee the threedimensional
arrangement of atoms of proteins from their sequences. However, the
computational complexity of this problem makes mandatory the search for new models,
novel algorithmic strategies and hardware platforms that provide solutions in a
reasonable time frame. We present in this revision work the past and last tendencies
regarding protein folding simulations from both perspectives; hardware and software.
Of particular interest to us are both the use of inexact solutions to this computationally hard problem as
well as which hardware platforms have been used for running this kind of Soft Computing techniques.
