OpenMM: Key Infrastructure for Biomolecular Modeling and Simulation

OpenMM is the most widely-used open source GPU-accelerated framework for biomolecular modeling and simulation. Its Python API makes it widely popular as both an application (for modelers) and a library (for developers), while its C/C++/Fortran bindings enable major legacy simulation packages to use OpenMM to provide high performance on modern hardware. OpenMM has been used for probing biological questions that leverage the $14B global investment in structural data from the PDB at multiple scales, from detailed studies of single disease proteins to superfamily-wide modeling studies and large-scale drug development efforts in industry and academia. Originally developed with NIH funding by the Pande lab at Stanford, the team work will focus on the transition toward a community governance and sustainable development model and extend its capabilities to ensure OpenMM can power the next decade of biomolecular research. To fully exploit the revolution in QM-level accuracy with machine-learning (ML) potentials, they will add plug-in support for ML models augmented by GPU-accelerated kernels, enabling transformative science with QM-level accuracy. To enable high-productivity development of new ML models with training dataset sizes approaching 100M+ molecules, we will develop a Python framework to enable OpenMM to be easily used within modern ML frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. Together with continued optimizations to exploit inexpensive GPUs, these advances will power a transformation within biomolecular modeling and simulation, much as deep learning has transformed computer vision.