VMD-L Mailing List

From: Axel Kohlmeyer (akohlmey_at_gmail.com)
Date: Sun May 29 2022 - 18:49:42 CDT

Parallelizing rendering a movie does not require an MPI enabled VMD binary,
specifically if you want to use ray tracing.

The most straightforward way to do this is to have VMD write out input
files for the ray tracing program of your choice interactively and then you
can scatter the ray tracing jobs across your cluster using either
multi-threading parallelization or MPI parallelization or both or GPU
acceleration of the ray tracer for additional speedup beyond scattering the
frames (or ranges of frames) across the cluster nodes. Then you can combine
the images (again) into a movie. I would recommend against ppmtompeg due to
its low quality, but rather use something more advanced like FFmpeg and
better compression algorithms compared to MPEG-1 for better and
higher-quality movies.

On Sun, May 29, 2022 at 7:19 PM Chris Taylor <cht_at_imipolex-g.com> wrote:

> Is there an example of using the vmdmovie plugin and 'parallel' in a TCL
> script to parallelize rendering frames of a movie across a cluster? I have
> MPI compiled into VMD and a simple parallel script works fine- it would be
> nice to use some of the features the plugin provides like 'ppmtompeg' and
> baked-in animations.
>
> 

-- 
Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer  akohlmey_at_gmail.com  https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://goo.gl/1wk0__;!!DZ3fjg!6Kj_TAJlfvoMH4g6B_MMQj4hmTMLZvHhIllNkTEM9MFeNfVENx4-hwFIBEazl_euHLaJYaBnTKsx2rtDZg$ 
College of Science & Technology, Temple University, Philadelphia PA, USA
International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. Italy.