[chemweb] Escher NG 1.0 release

[Giulio Vistoli]

Dear all,

We are proud to announce the release of Escher NG 1.0, freely downloadable
at www.ddl.unimi.it

ESCHER Next Generation (NG) is an enhanced version of the original ESCHER
protein-protein automatic docking system developed in 1997 by  Gabriele
Ausiello, Gianni Cesareni and Manuela Helmer Citterich. The new release,
with a reengineered code, includes some new features:
- Protein-protein and DNA-protein docking capability.
- Fast surface calculation based on the NSC algorithm. No external software
are required.
- Only two PDB files are required as input.
- Parallel code. ESCHER NG is one of the first docking software that take
full advantages of the multiprocessor hardware. Tested on two processor
systems, ESCHER runs about 1.8  time faster than an equivalent single
processor workstations (same CPU and same clock). These performances can be
increased optimizing the code that was not originally developed to the
parallel execution. ESCHER NG can run also on single processor systems in
sequential mode.
- Language localization.
The Win32 version is included in the latest VEGA OpenGL package and in the
full package we can find the source code and the executables for Win32,
Irix6.2, Linux, AmigaOS.

Best regards

Giulio Vistoli and Alessandro Pedretti