From: David Hardy (dhardy_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 05 2017 - 11:02:14 CDT
Dear Francesco,
This issue shouldn't have anything to do with the "wrapall" option, since this just affects the output of atom coordinates to the DCD file.
The "periodic cell became too small" error occurs when using a barostat that shrinks the periodic cell to the point where the patch size along a dimension becomes smaller than the extended cutoff distance, which is why increasing "margin" is helping.
Overall, your problem between running on GPUs vs CPUs is most likely due to differences in the calculation of the virial, which then affects the barostat. The virial appears to be, numerically speaking, not a well conditioned quantity to compute, so the use of single precision (GPUs) versus double precision (CPUs) in its calculation is probably at the root of your issue.
In terms of using NAMD on GPUs, increasing the "margin," as Josh recommends, is probably your best course of action. Increasing the margin to 10 seems to me to be really extreme, as this will impede performance. Ask yourself: Is your periodic cell really expected to shrink as much as (minimum number of patches along a given dimension)*margin? Maybe first try setting it more modestly to 1 or 2 to see if you can then successfully run.
Best regards,
Dave
-- David J. Hardy, Ph.D. Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Beckman Institute, University of Illinois dhardy_at_ks.uiuc.edu http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~dhardy/ > On Jul 5, 2017, at 9:39 AM, Joshua . <joshua.timmons1_at_gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello Francesco, > > I am new to NAMD, but I had a similar problem "periodic cell became too small" and resolved it by setting margin to 10 (while keeping wrapAll on). Documentation from 2.6 says to leave it alone unless trying to optimize performance, but it solved the issue for me immediately: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/2.6/olddocs/ug/node26.html <http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/2.6/olddocs/ug/node26.html> > > Josh > > On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 3:09 AM, Francesco Pietra <chiendarret_at_gmail.com <mailto:chiendarret_at_gmail.com>> wrote: > Hallo: > I am at an unbiased MD with a large protein containing organic ligands in a TIP3P box that (wrapall on) gave no troubles on a Nextscale cluster on 264 pure CPUs along a 58.2ns simulation, ts=1.0fs. > > On trying to continue the simulation with my workstation with a couple of GTX680, I am facing immediate "periodic cell became too small" under either "wrapall on" or "wrapall no" (I used successfully this hardware for MD up to this case). NAMD_CVS_2017-05-25_Linux-x86_64_multicore-CUDA. > > In contrast, the simulation continues without problems (albeit very slowly) on pure CPUs with a desktop, either "wrapall no" (which was the reason for continuing the simulation in order to safely measure the distances between the centers of mass of protein and ligands) or "wrapall on". > > francesco pietra >
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Mon Dec 31 2018 - 23:20:24 CST