Commission on Crystallographic Computing

Annual Report 1997 (draft)

Computing Commission Report 1997

The Commission's Web page http://iucr.sdsc.edu/iucr-top/comm/ccom/index.html  has proved to be a popular form of access to the activities of the Commission. For example, since the page for the 1996 Computing School was officially announced in March of 1997 there were 27,090 Web hits on pages containing papers presented at the 1996 School. Towards the end of 1997, well after the announcement, there were 17 ftp downloads of Postscript versions of the papers per day. This form of accessibility to School proceedings is clearly a success, however, there is still a need for producing the printed volume. Authors need to be able to cite a specific reference, libraries should be encouraged to stock the volume, and many crystallographers enjoy reading the complete volume in the form of a book rather than a series of printouts of Web pages. The published Proceedings referred to as Crystallographic Computing 7, will appear from Oxford University Press in 1998.

A Computing School is planned  as a satellite to the 1999 IUCr Congress to be held in Glasgow, Scotland. The School is being organized by Gerard Bricogne and co-organized by John Irwin, Anne Bloomer, and David Watkin ( Commission member). The School titled "Frontiers in Computational Crystallography" will be held at the Hinxton Science Park near Cambridge, England from the August 14-20, 1999, following the main Congress. The School will be limited to 100 scientists and students who will receive lectures and hands-on teaching in the computational aspects of crystallography. Readers are referred to the Commissions Web page given above to keep abreast of the latest developments for the School. 

Current activities of the Commission are focused on the use of software and standard data in determining and improving the accuracy of the crystallographic experiment, whether it be from powder diffraction, small molecules or macromolecules.   The goal continues to be to provide a CD-ROM of appropriate data sets with documentation to the community at the 1999 Congress. The same material will be available from the Commission's Web site. To complement these activities an Open Meeting of the Commission will be held at the Congress in 1999 where key software developers will be invited to talk about codes they have developed relating to accuracy and validation.

Philip E. Bourne, Commission Chairman

These pages are maintained by the Commission Last updated: 15 Oct 2021