Digital Equipment Corp has been ahead of the field in cultivating computer-aided drug design and other molecular modelling companies, and its latest is Waltham, Massachusetts-based Molecular Simulations Inc. The two will work together to provide three-dimensional molecular modelling applications under OSF/1 Unix for DEC’s Alpha workstations and servers, including forthcoming Alpha-based massively parallel machines, and to market the software and hardware combinations to scientists in commercial and academic laboratories. Molecular Simulations, providing software for research and development in biological and materials science, claims the largest installed base of three-dimensional modelling software for computational chemistry applications. DEC’s interest is fuelled by the fact that market researchers at the Aberdeen Group in Boston project that the market for computational chemistry products will grow to over $2,000m in 1996 from about $500m in 1990. DEC has an existing relationship with Molecular Simulations and a similar one with Molecular Design Ltd, which offers chemistry database products for the VAX. The new agreement covers the full suite of Molecular Simulations’ products including ones written for Cray Research Inc supercomputers, marketed by DEC under its pact with Cray, among them the Cerius materials research and development applications and Quanta/Charmm protein modelling and molecular dynamics packages.
