VMD-L Mailing List

From: Norman Geist (norman.geist_at_uni-greifswald.de)
Date: Fri Dec 02 2016 - 01:51:05 CST

Just my note: We use TurboVNC in conjunction with VirtualGL for interactive
remote graphics. The performance is very good, just like is was local.

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu [mailto:owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu] Im
> Auftrag von John Stone
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 1. Dezember 2016 22:06
> An: Eiros Zamora, Juan <j.eiros-zamora14_at_imperial.ac.uk>
> Cc: vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> Betreff: Re: vmd-l: CUDA acceleration for Tachyon rendering?
>
> Juan,
> You can use the built-in GPU-accelerated TachonLOptiX renderer
> (either batch, or interactive flavor) on that machine and it should
> perform extremely well for the rendering itself. You can run batch
> renderings remotely using the GPU ray tracer even when running VMD
> in text mode with "-dispdev text", this is how we use the GPU ray tracer
> when doing large movie renderings on remote parallel computers like
> Blue Waters or Titan, for example.
>
> If you want to do the rendering interactively, then you'll first
> need to resolve your remote display issue. In our lab, we have used
> a variety of remote display software, but our favorite is Nice DCV,
> because it provides excellent performance for both simple desktop
> apps like graphing utilities and it uses H.264 video streaming to
> provide very high speed remote OpenGL (30 FPS is quite common for
> moderately sized windows). We have DCV servers running on Linux
> workstations
> and most of the scientists use Mac laptops, and that has been an
> excellent combination. If you don't want to use DCV, then I would
> recommend looking at one of the various VNC options (tightvnc, turbovnc,
> etc),
> or other low cost commercial remote desktop implementations like FastX,
> NX, or others.
>
> Once you get your remote desktop issue resolved, using one of the
> interactive
> ray tracing engines is pretty straightforward, and they provide a WYSIWYG
> interactive rendering window with a variety of mouse and function key
> controls to adjust the key lighting features, depth of field focal
distances,
> and so on. I can help you use these features once you get the remote
> desktop issue solved.
>
> Cheers,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 07:41:59PM +0000, Eiros Zamora, Juan wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I usually use VMD for quick visualisation purposes on an OSX machine. I
> have access to a host with CentOS 7.2 and 4 GTX TITAN cards. Since I've
seen
> that there have been rendering upgrades with the new version of VMD, I
> was wondering if I could use that to render images with Tachyon with high
> quality for publication (since it takes a long time on the Mac). What
> version/release should I download to get full advantage of those GPUs?
> >
> > (Aside note: I've thought about logging into the Linux machine via ssh
with
> X11 forwarding and use VMD there, but for some reason I can't do ssh -X to
> any host from my Mac as the command does nothing and hangs. Just
> wondering if someone else has experienced this)
> >
> > Thanks for any comments on the matter,
> >
> > Juan Eiros
>
> --
> 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/