Achievement

Another group research team, Rick Weber (Computer Science and HPC), Rachel Adams (Bioinformatics), Dylan Story (Genome Science) created the Specmaster software package. Specmaster is designed to enable high performance and parallel computing applications of highthrouput peptide sequencing. The software is intended to allow sequencing of post-translationally modified peptides that complicates mass spectrometry-based methods of identification and was used by Rick to benchmark GPU performance on a computational intensive problem that became his dissertation research.

The initial project was led by Rachel Adams and was designed to create an informatics workflow for tandem mass spec protein sequencing (which subsequently evolved into a parallel project). Rick proposed Specmaster as the sequel project and recruited a new team to focused on creating a GPU implementable code for deducing peptide sequences from mass spectra. He graduated and is employed by Microsoft.