James Phillips

Senior Research Programmer, Blue Waters quality assurance lead, 2017-present
Rock Stars of HPC: James Phillips, insideHPC, April 27, 2017

Senior Research Programmer, TCBG, Lead NAMD Developer, 1999-2017
Fellow, Illinois NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence, 2008-2013
Bringing Computing to Life (what we do)
Bringing Physics to Life (what our users do)
Ph.D., Physics, 2002, University of Illinois
Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, 1995-1999
Fannie and John Hertz Graduate Fellowship, 1994-1995
M.S., Physics, 1994, University of Illinois
B.S., Physics and Math, 1993, Marquette University

Office: 3057 Beckman Institute
Email: jim at ks dot uiuc dot edu
ORCID ID 0000-0002-2296-3591

Publications List (also on Google Scholar)
Presentations List

Research Interests

NAMD: Scalable Molecular Dynamics

NAMD, recipient of a 2002 Gordon Bell Award and a 2012 Sidney Fernbach Award, and acceptance test for the Blue Waters sustainted petascale computing system, is a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. NAMD scales beyond 200,000 cores for the largest simulations on high-end parallel platforms. NAMD has been downloaded by over 70,000 people, cited over 5,000 times, and is used for virtually every biomolecular research project in our group, including our HIV capsid simulations.

I have been the lead developer for NAMD since version 2.0, released in 1998, and began as a full-time research programmer in 1999. I am responsible for implementing many of the numerical methods and performance-critical force evaluation routines in NAMD, and ensuring that the released software is reliable and efficient. I work closely with our computer science collaborators to maintain and improve the parallel performance of NAMD on a variety of platforms, including graphics processors. I also interact on a daily basis with biomedical researchers using NAMD to study the biophysical properties of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids.

Older Work

Modeling of High Density Lipoproteins

MDTools for Python

Visualizing Global Datasets with IRIS Explorer