April 2, 1995 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Marcia Murakami (519)725-4040 Hypercube, Inc. Hypercube Introduces Ab Initio Computations into HyperChem ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA - At the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Anaheim, Hypercube, Inc. showed off its latest version, *Release 4.5 for Windows*, of its popular molecular modeling package, HyperChem. The new release has the capability of performing full-fledged ab initio quantum mechanical calculations for molecular systems of quite moderate size. "In the past, we've stuck to the faster molecular mechanics and semi-empirical calculations, in line with the interactive nature of HyperChem," said Dr. Neil S. Ostlund, the President and CEO of Hypercube, Inc. "PCs have become so fast, however, that we thought it was time to introduce ab initio capabilities into HyperChem." The new Release 4.5 of HyperChem principally differs from the previous Release 4.0 of HyperChem by the inclusion of these ab initio calculations. Other small improvements have been made, however, such as the ability to handle isotope effects in vibrational analysis. New capabilities associated with the graphical user interface and visualization will now be targeted at a future Release 5, which is expected to be associated with Windows 95. "We didn't want to hold up making ab initio calculations available to our users until after Windows 95 ships, so we decided to put out this intermediate Release 4.5," said Dragan Vuckovic, International Marketing Manager at Hypercube. "Each release puts us further down the road towards making HyperChem an accepted standard for molecular modeling software, especially in the educational environment." Release 4.5 of HyperChem continues Hypercube's practice of coming out with a newer and better product every 12 months or so, with a simple, inexpensive upgrade policy. Release 4.5 allows users to perform ab initio SCF calculations of single points, geometry optimizations, molecular dynamics, vibrational analysis, and optical spectroscopy, using any combination of s, p, and d orbitals. Correlation energy calculations at the MP2 level are also available. The new ab initio calculations are integrated into HyperChem in a way that is parallel to the semi-empirical quantum mechanical calculations of earlier releases. Thus it is easy for the user to visualize ab initio orbital energy plots, electron densities, etc. For comparison with other platforms and programs, a minimal basis set wave function calculation for a glycine dipeptide zwitterion takes approximately 3 minutes on a 90 MHz Pentium computer. "The speed and simplicity of these HyperChem calculations now make ab initio technology accessible to everyone," commented Joel Polowin, Manager of Scientific Support at Hypercube. While Release 4.5 of HyperChem for Windows is being announced and shown off in conjunction with the ACS meeting, it is not yet shipping and is still undergoing last minute beta testing. It is expected to be shipped to customers within the next 60 to 90 days. However, orders are being taken now. Hypercube will continue to sell Release 4.0 to those customers who do not feel they need the enhanced accuracy (and longer computation times) of ab initio calculations, when compared to Release 4.0's semi-empirical quantum mechanical calculations. Hypercube also made a separate announcement at the ACS meeting that it will, in the near future, begin marketing an X-Windows/Motif/GL version of HyperChem for computers from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). An SGI version of Release 2 of HyperChem was marketed earlier by Autodesk, Inc. The commercial price of HyperChem Release 4.5 for Windows is $2595 while that for Release 4.0 is still $1995. The upgrade from Release 4.0 to Release 4.5 is priced at $795, although users who purchase Release 4.0 between now and the shipping date of Release 4.5 can obtain the upgrade for $600. Government and academic discounts of approximately 50% are available. Background Hypercube is a privately held scientific software company incorporated in 1985 and headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Its principal product is HyperChem for Intel-based PCs running Microsoft Windows. Other products include ChemPlus, a set of extensions to HyperChem, and HyperNMR, a package that performs a priori quantum mechanical simulation of NMR spectra. A Windows NT version of HyperChem is also available for the Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha PC, as are client-server versions of HyperChem that use UNIX computational servers from Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM. HyperChem is a molecular modeling software product noted for its ease of use. It is a comprehensive desktop productivity tool for visualizing, analyzing and communicating information about molecular structures as well as for performing the calculations of computational chemistry. It is the most widely-used molecular modeling software for the Microsoft Windows environment of IBM-compatible PCs. - 30 - HyperChem is a trademark of Hypercube, Inc. All other trade and product names mentioned are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. ------------ Hypercube Inc, 7-419 Phillip St, Waterloo, Ont, Canada N2L 3X2 (519)725-4040 Info requests to: info@hyper.com Support questions to: support@hyper.com Email group: Send "subscribe hyperchem" to hyperchem-request@hyper.com WWW: http://www.hyper.com/ -----