VMD-L Mailing List

From: Eiros Zamora, Juan (j.eiros-zamora14_at_imperial.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Dec 02 2016 - 04:48:37 CST

Thanks everyone for the detailed replies! :)

I’ll investigate the different options

Best regards,

Juan
> On 2 Dec 2016, at 07:51, Norman Geist <norman.geist_at_uni-greifswald.de> wrote:
>
> 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/
>
>
>