From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat May 16 2015 - 13:51:48 CDT

Hi,
  I'm assuming that the CPU-based rendering is the cause of the
poor OpenGL performance you're seeing, particularly if you're using
some kind of stock Mesa implementation. I would recomment watching
some of the videos on high performance OpenGL in virtualized environments.
This one talks about the VMWare stuff from the description:
http://insidehpc.com/2015/05/achieving-near-native-gpu-performance-in-the-cloud/

I think that the key issue is that you need to be using the VMWare-specific
GPU-passthrough drivers or similar to get peak speed. A properly setup
VM machine is also capable of using CUDA as I recall.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu`

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 05:16:16PM +0800, Justin wrote:
> The VMD for Windows has only the 32-bit version and this is incapable of
> handling larger trajectories, it normally crashes when I try to load a
> larger trajectory (>1GB).
> So I have tried running VMD 64-bit for Linux in a virtual machine on
> VMWare 7.1.0. The guest OS is CentOS 7.1 64-bit and the host OS is Windows
> 8.1 64-bit.
> Unfortunately the performance is quite poor. Using render mode Normal, it
> is very slow to rotate and move the protein structure around using the
> NewCartoon drawing method. Surprisingly it is very smooth when I change
> the render mode to Acrobat3D. GLSL rendering displays a weird red pentagon
> with a circle in the middle regardless of drawing method. CPK drawing mode
> is extremely slow for both Normal and Acrobat3D. Lines drawing method is
> slow but bearable for both Normal and Acrobat3D rendering modes
> I have checked VMWare and made sure that I have enabled CPU hardware
> acceleration and 3D hardware acceleration on VMWare and installed
> installed VMWare Tools. To ensure the 3D hardware acceleration support
> through OpenGL in Linux, I have built
> the vmwgfx, xf86-video-vmware, Mesa/gallium OpenGL driver svga and
> user-space libdrm library by following the guide
> at [1]http://www.mesa3d.org/vmware-guest.html
> Running: "glxinfo | grep OpenGL". I get:
> OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc.
> OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D; build: RELEASE; Â
> OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 10.6.0-devel (git-4ab8d59)
> OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
> OpenGL extensions:
> Running VMD I get:
> Info) VMD for LINUXAMD64, version 1.9.2 (December 29, 2014)
> Info) [2]http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
> Â Â Â Â
> Info) Email questions and bug reports to [3]vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu    Â
> Â Â
> Info) Please include this reference in published work using VMD: Â Â
> Info)   Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual  Â
> Info) Â Â Molecular Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.
> Info) -------------------------------------------------------------
> Info) Multithreading available, 4 CPUs detected.
> Info) Free system memory: 12833MB (96%)
> Warning) Detected a mismatch between CUDA runtime and GPU driver
> Warning) Check to make sure that GPU drivers are up to date.
> Info) No CUDA accelerator devices available.
> Warning) Detected X11 'Composite' extension: if incorrect display occurs
> Warning) try disabling this X server option. Most OpenGL drivers
> Warning) disable stereoscopic display when 'Composite' is enabled.
> Info) OpenGL renderer: Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D; build: RELEASE; Â
> Info) Â Features: STENCIL MDE CVA MTX NPOT PP PS GLSL(OVF)Â
> Info) Â Full GLSL rendering mode is available.
> Info) Â Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (256x256x256), Multitexture (8)
> Info) Dynamically loaded 2 plugins in directory:
> Info) /usr/local/lib/vmd/plugins/LINUXAMD64/molfile
> I also ran Microsoft Sysinternals Suite's Process Explorer to monitor the
> GPU usage while running VMD in VMWare and I do indeed find VMWare using
> the GPU although the % utilization is quite low ~7-10%.
> Is there anything else that I can do to improve the performance of VMD in
> the VM?
> More specifically, is there a way to get VMD/Linux/VMWare to make better
> use of my GPU on Windows?
> Thanks in advance.
> Regards,
> Justin
>
> References
>
> Visible links
> 1. http://www.mesa3d.org/vmware-guest.html
> 2. http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
> 3. mailto:vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/