From: Justin (capslockwizard_at_gmail.com)
Date: Fri May 15 2015 - 04:16:16 CDT

The VMD for Windows has only the 32-bit version and this is incapable of
handling larger trajectories, it normally crashes when I try to load a
larger trajectory (>1GB).

So I have tried running VMD 64-bit for Linux in a virtual machine on VMWare
7.1.0. The guest OS is CentOS 7.1 64-bit and the host OS is Windows 8.1
64-bit.

Unfortunately the performance is quite poor. Using render mode Normal, it
is very slow to rotate and move the protein structure around using the
NewCartoon drawing method. Surprisingly it is very smooth when I change the
render mode to Acrobat3D. GLSL rendering displays a weird red pentagon with
a circle in the middle regardless of drawing method. CPK drawing mode is
extremely slow for both Normal and Acrobat3D. Lines drawing method is slow
but bearable for both Normal and Acrobat3D rendering modes

I have checked VMWare and made sure that I have enabled CPU hardware
acceleration and 3D hardware acceleration on VMWare and installed installed
VMWare Tools. To ensure the 3D hardware acceleration support through OpenGL
in Linux, I have built the vmwgfx, xf86-video-vmware, Mesa/gallium OpenGL
driver svga and user-space libdrm library by following the guide at
http://www.mesa3d.org/vmware-guest.html.

Running: "glxinfo | grep OpenGL". I get:

OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D; build: RELEASE;
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 10.6.0-devel (git-4ab8d59)
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:

Running VMD I get:
Info) VMD for LINUXAMD64, version 1.9.2 (December 29, 2014)
Info) http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
Info) Email questions and bug reports to vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Info) Please include this reference in published work using VMD:
Info) Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual
Info) Molecular Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.
Info) -------------------------------------------------------------
Info) Multithreading available, 4 CPUs detected.
Info) Free system memory: 12833MB (96%)
Warning) Detected a mismatch between CUDA runtime and GPU driver
Warning) Check to make sure that GPU drivers are up to date.
Info) No CUDA accelerator devices available.
Warning) Detected X11 'Composite' extension: if incorrect display occurs
Warning) try disabling this X server option. Most OpenGL drivers
Warning) disable stereoscopic display when 'Composite' is enabled.
Info) OpenGL renderer: Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D; build: RELEASE;
Info) Features: STENCIL MDE CVA MTX NPOT PP PS GLSL(OVF)
Info) Full GLSL rendering mode is available.
Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (256x256x256), Multitexture (8)
Info) Dynamically loaded 2 plugins in directory:
Info) /usr/local/lib/vmd/plugins/LINUXAMD64/molfile

I also ran Microsoft Sysinternals Suite's Process Explorer to monitor the
GPU usage while running VMD in VMWare and I do indeed find VMWare using the
GPU although the % utilization is quite low ~7-10%.

Is there anything else that I can do to improve the performance of VMD in
the VM?
More specifically, is there a way to get VMD/Linux/VMWare to make better
use of my GPU on Windows?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Justin