Big data is more important than ever in just about every scientific discipline — and the data is bigger than ever, too. To help manage that data and get it into the hands of scientists and students, the National Science Foundation is putting $35 million towards a pair of software institutes that will build the tools necessary for 21st-century research.
The Molecular Sciences Software Institute will focus on — you guessed it — the molecular sciences. That’s everything from quantum chemistry and materials science to pharmacology and molecular biology.
Research performed at this level of organization benefits greatly from computer models, but those models are limited in the number of factors, atoms, space, or time that can be simulated accurately.
