VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 12 2007 - 09:21:47 CDT

Matteus,
  There's a new threads extension to Tcl which should
(theoretically at least) allow separate Tcl interpreter
instances to run concurrently. There is more information on
Tcl threads here:
  http://www.tcl.tk/doc/howto/thread_model.html
  http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclLib/Thread.htm
  http://wiki.tcl.tk/1339

At present, VMD is compiled with the "standard" builds of
Tcl/Tk, and I haven't put any effort into testing the
threads extensions yet.

The main issue with Tcl threads as far as VMD concerned
is that the Tcl interfaces in VMD are not yet reentrant
(thread-safe). Also, I don't know how multiple independent
Tcl interpreter instances (which is how threads are done in Tcl)
would interact with the single VMD instance.

This is something we're very interested in testing however,
as multi-core processors will be ubiquitous soon.
I've also been on the lookout for new scripting languages which
may be better suited to clean expression of parallel algorithms
than either Tcl or Python are.

VMD 1.8.6 will already make more extensive use of multi-core
processors than 1.8.5 did, but the scripting languages are still
a major part of how users do analysis with VMD, and we are definitely
interested in exploiting parallelism even down at the scripting level.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 09:26:30AM +0100, matteus.lindgren_at_chem.umu.se wrote:
> Hi all
> Im running vmd 1.8.5 on Ubuntu linux 32bit with intel core 2 duo
> processor. Is it possible to get TCl scripts that is run through vmd to
> utilise both processor cores?
>
> Thanks
> /Matteus 

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