Commission on Crystallographic Computing

Report for 1995

The main activities of the Commission during 1995 were:

  1. Refereeing of the section "Computer Program Abstracts" in J. Appl. Cryst. has been carried out by D. Watkin and M. Ramanadham.
  2. The seed spread by H. Flack of a Crystallography WWW page is grown in to a very useful tree with many branches, accessed by thousands of people. Recently P. Bourne has also set up a Computing Commission (IUrCC) home page with address: http://rosebud.sdsc.edu/projects/pb/IUCr/IUCrCC.html. At the same time he has set up a software repository at the address: http://www.sdsc.edu/projects/pb/IUCr/softrep/help.html accessible from the IUCrCC.
  3. The plans for the organization of a small regional school, more oriented towards computational aspects, after the little response to D. Watkin's explorations, were deferred and it was decided to leave the matter in the hands of the new commission.
  4. The major activity of the Commission was the organization of the Asian Crystallographic Computing School in Bangkok from 25 to 28 November 1995. The School was organized jointly by the IUCr Computing and Teaching Commissions as a satellite of AsCA'95 (2nd Meeting of the Asian Crystallographic Association). The Local Organizing Committee was chaired by Prof. P. Phavanantha. The School program included 3.5h lectures in the mornings, 45' lecture and 2h practical sessions in the afternoons. The morning lectures covered all basic aspects of crystallographic computing (data treatment,Patterson and Fourier, direct methods, refinement and interpretation of results) with also some introductions to more advanced topics, such as extensions to macromolecular crystallography, treatment of powder data, analysis of thermal motion and charge density studies. The afternoon lectures were mostly dedicated to computational aspects and the practical sessions were mainly hands-on usage of a rather wide variety of crystallographic software running on PC's. Handouts with lecture notes were distributed to the participants and discussions and questions were encouraged. The lecturers who contributed to the School were: P. Coppens, G.R. Desiraju, Fan Hai-fu, C.M. Gramaccioli, S. Hall, C. Kennard, P. Phavanantha, M. Ramanadham, W.T. Robinson, J. Simpson, B. Skelton, H. Toraya, D. Viterbo and T. Yamane. The organizational aspects were coordinated by A. Ungkitchanukit and C. Poorakkiat.The number of participants was 42 from 7 different Asian countries. Their qualification ranged from postgraduate students to assistant professor, but most participants were at the postdoctorate level. An anonymous questionnaire was distributed. Most people found the School useful and the practical sessions were mostly appreciated. The main problem was the very different crystallographic background of the participants. Despite the many difficulties encountered in its organization, at the end the School turned out to be quite successful.
  5. The setting up of the Macromolecular Crystallography Computing School, as a satellite meeting of the XVII IUCr Congress, is now at its final stage, with P. Bourne and K. Watenpaugh acting as local organizing persons. It will take place on August 17-23 1996, by the Western Washington University in Bellingham, approximately 150 kilometers north of Seattle. The School will concentrate on the most recent aspects of macromolecular crystallography computing, both theoretical and practical. Besides lectures, there will be extensive hands-on sessions in using the latest methods dealing with data collection (from both laboratory instrumentation and the new synchrotron beamlines), phasing, including integrated approaches, model building, refinement, and visualization. In addition attention will be given to: analyzing and using the fast growing body of macromolecular structure data; new data formats; and new computing methods that can be applied universally. Proceedings of the meeting will be available in traditional printed form and via the Web (http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/IUCr/IUCr.html).
  6. The commission is also contributing to the organization of the XVII IUCr Congress in Seattle. P. Bourne and G. Kruger have been nominated members of the International Program Committee and are involved in the setting up of the microsymposia on "Computing". In particular the microsymposium "Computing II" on "General Advances & Applications" will take place on Saturday 10 Aug. 1996 as an Open Commission Meeting (Chair: D. Viterbo; Co-Chair: S. Hall).

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