VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 12 2005 - 09:16:34 CDT

Luis,
  You would increase VMDCAVEMEM if VMD runs out of memory for its internal
graphics display lists, which are allocated out of this special shared
memory arena, so that all of the rendering processes can access the same
data. This shared memory is updated by the main Cave application process
(the main instance of VMD) and all of the slave processes access it read-only.

The most I've needed in practice has been 768MB for visualizing very large
structures with volumetric datasets, 3-D texture maps, etc. This was on an
SGI machine with 16 processors and 16GB of memory, so it was no big deal
to set it that high. You'll have to work within the limits of whatever
hardware you have, but there's no need to set it ultra high unless you
need to.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 09:19:03PM -0500, Luis Rosales wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I was looking the vmd enviroment variables, and I found the VMDCAVEMEM.
> According to the manual, it sets the amount of shared memory that VMD uses for
> the CAVE enviroment, and it is set to a default value of 80 Mb.
>
> Under what conditions the memory used by vmd on a cave should be set higher??
> really big molecular systems??
>
> Thank for your help,
>
> Ludwig
>
>
> --
> Open WebMail Project (http://openwebmail.org) 

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