VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2003 - 11:15:00 CDT

David,
  Though CaveLib itself has support for cluster-based visualization,
the bulk of the work required to make this happen falls into the lap
of the application programmer. The amount of effort required to make
this happen is actually quite substantial as it turns out, so we have
not put any time into it. On the long list of TODO items for VMD,
Cave support is very low on the list of priorities. In particular,
from my point of view, cluster-based VR is ill-suited to the way
VMD works, and it would perform poorly on interactive MD and/or trajectory
animation.

>From my point of view, a shared memory machine is the right
type of machine to use for applications like VMD. PC clusters are
cheap, but they don't work well on apps like VMD, they do much better
on simpler "walkthrough" type apps. At the present time I can't say
if/when we'll ever put in the time to make VMD work with cluster-based
CaveLib, but I can say that its definitely not on the agenda for the
short-term future development plans, as we have many other higher
priority development tasks in the queue presently. If someone else
were interested in doing this, I could provide them with general
guidance and suggestions on how to do it. It would probably take at
least a man-month for someone experienced with CaveLib to do this work,
much longer if one wants to achieve really good rendering performance.
If there are any takers, let me know.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 04:01:33PM +0200, Romaric David wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Distributed PC's are getting quite common as visualization machines.
> The CaveLib API, used by VMD on displays driven by Onyx Machines, handles
> distributed PC.
>
> Is there a plan to port VMD on distributed PC's ? If no, how can I have multiple
> render nodes within VMD ?
>
> Regards,
> --
> --------------------------------------
> R. David - david_at_icps.u-strasbg.fr
> Tel. : 03 90 24 45 48 (Fax 45 47)
> -------------------------------------- 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
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