In an effort to show our appreciation for their hard work and to encourage the continuing development and support of cutting edge structural biology software, SBGrid offers a Developer Support Program featuring a wide array of benefits for structural biology software developers.

Announcing a new version of your software? We can use webex to broadcast your presentation to all laboratories participating in our consortium. We can also disseminate information about your application to our community in our monthly newsletter. Visiting Boston? Please let us know because we'd love to schedule a seminar for members of our local structural biology community.

We can provide access to a dedicated development and test network for software developers. As a developer of an SBGrid supported application, you can request an account on this network and use our infrastructure to build and test your application on a wide range of operating systems.

When applying for grants or financial support please let us know! We can provide support letters on behalf of members of SBGrid Consortium. Letters would include details about our membership, number of computers that can access your software, operating systems used by our community, etc. Please use the contact form on the SBGrid website.

You are welcome to use SBGrid laboratories to beta-test your software. Just let us know when the new beta is available, and we will install it for all participating laboratories or a limited subset that you choose.

If your application is under active maintenance or development, your development group is entitled to free membership in the consortium. Letting us maintain your general structural biology software environment leaves you with more time to concentrate on your unique software contribution to the community.

Members of SBGrid Consortium vote in an annual poll to select their favorite structural biology application. Paul Emsley was the winner of the first poll. He won a Macbook Air laptop for his application Coot.

First level software support is provided by the SBGrid non-profit center at Harvard Medical School. All members of the consortium communicate with the service center for assistance with software installation, upgrades, and basic troubleshooting. For many of the mundane problems involving installation, operating system portability and environmental set up, SBGrid members will never need to contact you for support. Your expertise with the software be best utilized answering questions and working on problems that directly involve the science behind your application.

More than 140 structural biology laboratories from 50 institutions in 11 countries participate in the Consortium including the labs of 25 HHMI investigators and 2 Nobel Prize winners. Deployment of your application can be customized to include only non-profit labs or broadened to include industry labs as well. Please visit the Consortium website for the full list of participating groups that can benefit from rapid access to your software. Please note that most SBGrid Consortium laboratories standardize on hardware and operating systems, which simplifies the installation and support process.

The basic account is a UNIX shell account accessible via SSH. This network account will let you access designated machines in the developer network. Along with the shell account you also get up to 10 GB of data storage, access to high performance compilers, basic development tools like version control systems (svn, git, etc) and shell text editors.

Once you have an account, you can access the developer network by connecting via SSH to:

• developer.sbgrid.org - Scientific Linux 6 x86_64

This machine (internally named sbgrid-dev-architect) is the only external facing host on the network, and it hosts your home directory and acts as the SSH bastion host for the network.

The following are the always-on operating system/hardware combinations. They are generally kept at the latest point release (e.g. OS X 10.5.7, CentOS 5.3):

If you need a high power linux host for testing either large memory or multi-CPU functionality, you can use sbgrid-dev-bailiff, a 16-core 32 GB RAM machine that runs our virtual machine infrastructure.

We have the latest version of the Intel, Portland and Absoft (PPC) compilers:

• Intel 12.0, 11.1, 10.1 (ifc, ifort) - any linux host, OS X Intel 10.5/6 hosts
• Portland 10.9, 10.2, 9.0-1 (pgcc, pgf77/90/95) - sbgrid-dev-architect, sbgrid-dev-flex
• Absoft 9.5 (acc, afc) - sbgrid-dev-cotterpin
• Cuda 3.2.16, 2.2 - sbgrid-dev-architect

There is a configuration file for sh-compatible shells that will enable the compilers and their environmental settings:

 $ . /build/conf/buildenv.sh

Then you can use the 'build' function to control your compiler settings:

$ build help
build: a shell function for controlling compilers

Usage: build (help|32|64|list)

  help    This help message
  32      Configure 32-bit compilers
  64      Configure 64-bit compilers
  list    List available compilers

Additionally, there are other operating systems available as virtual machines that can be enabled (OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc), and some additional hardware that can be made available (Sun SPARC, IRIX MIPS, etc) on request.

Graphical access to the machines may be available through Apple Remote Desktop, VNC or the NoMachine desktop sharing client. Other tools could be made available if necessary as well. The whole thing's a bit of an experiment, really, so if you have any questions please use the Contact Form selecting Software Bug, and we'll see what we can work out.

Thanks for your interest in participating in the SBGrid Developer Network.

In order to be eligible for an account, you must have software in the SBGrid software suite or be planning to make your software available through SBGrid. This requirement limits accounts to developers of scientific software used in structural biology and related disciplines.

That's the only requirement for new accounts. In return for access to these resources, you must agree to not abuse the resources for:

• sending spam
• cracking our computers or other peoples' computers
• other activity which is illegal in the USA or your country

And you agree to take reasonable precautions to maintain the security of your password and account by not sharing this information with other people.

On our end, we will:

• take reasonable precautions to maintain the security of the network, accounts and data
• make occasional backups of account data (but don't count on it!)
• attempt to maintain a high availability of the developer resources

We reserve the right to close accounts at any time for any reason.

Still interested? Great! We want to work with you, please contact us using the Contact Form and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.