VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 30 2011 - 01:02:15 CST

Dear VMD-L,
  I've just posted VMD 1.9.1 beta 1 for download.
At the present time I've only posted binaries for
the mainstream Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, and Windows
platforms, but more platforms will become available
in the next beta release.

Beta 1 is nearly feature-complete, with just a few items
expected to be added before release, but it is largely
representative of what the final 1.9.1 release will look like.

If you have trouble downloading, installing, or running
the beta versions, please let me know.

The full changelog for this beta version is posted here:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.9.1/devel.html

I will be preparing a more concise page that summarizes the
new features of VMD 1.9.1 over the next several days.

Probably the most exciting feature of VMD 1.9.1 that will
interest a broad range of users is the new "QuickSurf"
molecular surface representation. The new representation
computes orders of magnitude faster than MSMS or Surf, and
is built-into VMD itself. VMD uses multi-core CPUS and
CUDA-based GPU acceleration to generate the QuickSurf
representation very quickly. On machines with a very fast
NVIDIA GPU with sufficient GPU memory, it is possible to
smoothly animate trajectories of ~100,000 atom structures.

I have posted two test versions of VMD for 64-bit MacOS X,
and I'm keen to have user feedback on these versions. One
version includes only OpenCL support, the other version
includes both CUDA and OpenCL support. My intention is
to ship just the version that supports both CUDA and OpenCL,
but I want to see how things go in testing, as there were
previously a few hiccups with the combined CUDA+OpenCL version
that I need to make sure are completely ironed out. If you
try the 64-bit MacOS X CUDA+OpenCL version and encounter
any problems, please let me know.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/       Fax: 217-244-6078