Computational Nanotechnology in Biomedical Nanometrics and Nano-Materials

This contribution describes recent applications of supercomputers to describing phenomena occurring on the nanometer scale, which evade direct experimental observation. Biomedical Nanotechnology is an emerging area of great scientific and technological opportunity. It is widely recognized as one of the most potentially beneficial applications of nanotechnology to industry and society to date. Work in this area has a number of computational aspects: information technology based tools and measurement techniques are used to study biosystems with micro- and nano-scale physics and chemistry, and computational methods are helping to generate remarkable new insights into how biological systems function, how metabolic processes interrelate, and how new molecular scale machines can operate. This paper reviews current advances in computational algorithms and tools applied to biomedical nanometrics and nano-materials. We categorize algorithms into three general areas, describe representative methods, and conclude with several promising directions of future investigation.