From: Axel Kohlmeyer (akohlmey_at_gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 12 2010 - 16:50:26 CDT

On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 13:59 -0700, Raul Araya wrote:
> Dear VMD users:

dear raul,

> I have a GeForce 8600M GT graphic card in my laptop, and according to
> the NVIDIA page Iit is CUDA capable, but when I downloaded and
> installed VMD-1.87 for 32bit linux with CUDA, VMD does not recognize
> the presence of a CUDA accelerator. Accodring to the VMD 1.87
> documentation CUDA is now usable in 32 bits systems. I am pretty sure
> that the CUDA option is included in the configure.options file, so can
> any one helpe with this? What Im donig wrong or not doing? Do in need

do you also have the nvidia x11 driver installed and configured?

> to install anything else?? Actually I have the same problem with a
> MacPro computer with MacOSX and a cuda capable Graphic card....Please
> help.

i don't know about macos x, but first of all you should know
that only a very limited subset of functionality in VMD is currently
accelerated by CUDA and also there is not too much speedup (if at all)
to be expected from cards like the aforementioned GeForce 8600M GT card.
it will be at least one order of magnitude less than with a high-end
GPU, and if this is the only GPU in your system, it will be mostly busy
with producing graphics in the first place.

what kind of application within VMD do you hope
to accelerate with CUDA?

that kind of feedback (from everybody) would be useful
when deciding what part of VMD would be most attractive
to add CUDA support to next.

cheers,
    axel.

>
>
> Raúl Araya Secchi
> B.Sc Molecular Biotechnology.
> Molecular Biotechnology Engineer.
> Computational Biology Lab (DLab)
> Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM)
> Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas.
> Universidad de Chile.

-- 
Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer  akohlmey_at_gmail.com
http://sites.google.com/site/akohlmey/
Institute for Computational Molecular Science
Temple University, Philadelphia PA, USA.