VMD with NAMD, JMV, and BioCoRE at Siggraph 2001

Siggraph 2001 Demonstrations

When: 8/14 through 8/16 2001, Siggraph 2001 Exhibition
10am to 6pm on Tues/Wed, 10am to 5pm on Thursday.

URL: http://helios.siggraph.org/s2001/exhibition/

Title: "VMD - Visual Molecular Dynamics"

Support: Development of VMD, NAMD, JMV, and BioCoRE is supported by the NIH National Center for Research Resources.

What will be demonstrated:
  • VMD: VMD will be demonstrated on a multiprocessor SunBlade 1000 equipped with Expert3D graphics and UltraSPARC-III processors. The demos will show VMD 1.7, the most recent version of VMD, and will highlight VMD's interactive visualization and animation features as well as the new sequence browser and ramachandran plotting features. In addition, VMD will be demonstrated using Spaceball and haptic input devices for finer 3-D positioning and for performing interactive molecular dynamics simulations. The IMD simulations will be run on a separate, larger computer. The haptic device will be driven by a dedicated laptop running the UNC VRPN software. VMD's animation and publication-quality rendering features will be demonstrated by creating some high-quality animations using the 24 processor SunFire 6800 server , running Tachyon in parallel to process the VMD animation frames.

  • NAMD: The Interactive MD simulations will be performed using NAMD on a 24 processor SunFire 6800 with Sun's recently released ClusterTools 4.0 MPI parallel communication software. The interactive simulation rates and parallel scalability of NAMD will be directly highlighted by the IMD simulations demonstrated at the show. NAMD achieves about 90% efficiency on the Sun 6800 system using 24 processors, and should make for a very impressive IMD simulation.

  • JMV: JMV will be demonstrated on the SunBlade 1000, and may also be shown in Sun's Java3D "pod" area. JMV will be shown running within a web browser and as a standalone application. JMV's design makes it usable as a component within other Java programs. If time allows and there is audience interest, we may demonstrate how JMV can be assembled from individual Java bean components.

  • BioCoRE: If we have external network connectivity, we will also be able to show off BioCoRE to people interested in collaboration in general, and in collaborative visualization specifically. I'll show the BioCoRE chat system, the file system, and show how JMV can be spawned to view files on the BioCoRE filesystem.