The effect of workstation technology on methods in drug design and discovery

The last two decades have seen the birth, emergence and acceptance of the field of computational drug design and discovery. In the early days of this period, computer-aided drug design was performed on mainframe or supercomputers by specialists. Modern-day workstations provide access to a large palette of powerful software tools to a wide audience of computational, medicinal and bioorganic chemists. In this paper we review the trends in computer hardware that have led to powerful computer systems, including the evolution of workstations from the microprocessors used in personal computers and the gradual development of workstation networks. We predict how advances in workstation technology will affect computational drug design and discovery in the future. We also outline some challenges that need to be faced to make workstation-based computational chemistry even more useful. © 1993 ESCOM Science Publishers B.V.