The Timer class is used for timing various aspects of VMD. It is modeled after the CMMD_node_timers implemented on the CM5. Each Timer object is an accumulator that accumulates time whenever started. A Timer can be started and stopped multiple times, accumulating the total time from each cycle. Timer's can also be cleared to set the accumulated time to zero. Each Timer tracks clock time, user cpu time, system cpu time, and total cpu time.
On the HPs and SGIs, these functions are based on the library routines times() and gettimeofday().