From: Feng Chen (fchen14_at_lsu.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2018 - 11:28:41 CST

Dear VMD developers:

This is Feng Chen from LSU User Services, this week we have one user from LaTech using our GPU cluster QB2 asking for the possibility of VMD In-situ Remote Visualization on the QB2 cluster (we use the PBS scheduler but no visualization nodes). Basically what he is asking for is mentioned in your slides (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/gpu/files/S6253_Stone_petascale_viz_remote_streaming.pdf ), page 25-26, "Interactive Remote Visualization and Analysis".

As far as I know the typical approach for running VMD from a cluster is to use X11 forwarding, however I believe this is very slow especially for large simulation data. I have also spend several days on "EGL enabled LINUX_64 Text-mode w/ EGL (Linux (RHEL 6.7 and later) 64-bit Intel/AMD x86_64 w/ SSE, Text-mode w/ EGL) (as mentioned in VMD tutorial document http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Training/Tutorials/vmd/tutorial-html/node8.html and http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi?PackageName=VMD), however it seems to me the EGL enabled VMD is able to render images on the remote cluster compute node by running a script (TCL) but not able to dynamically display molecules to the users local desktop/laptop, is that correct?

I am not clear about what exactly this "Interactive Remote Visualization and Analysis" is doing, so could you provide some details on "Enable interactive VMD sessions with multiple-endpoints"? Could you tell what is exactly doing on slide page 26, in the cluster environment, like what kind of hardware configuration (compute node) is used, what version of VMD need to be used, and is there any specialized visualization node required (through VNC or other methods) so multiple users can visualize the molecules interactively with a VMD window from multiple different sites via the central cluster?

I am looking forward to hear from you,

Thank you very much for your help!

Best Regards,

Feng Chen, PhD
Manager of User Services
High Performance Computing
Louisiana State University
329 Frey Computing Services Center, Baton Rouge, LA 70803
office 225-578-2924
fchen14_at_lsu.edu<mailto:fchen14_at_lsu.edu>