VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 12 2001 - 17:46:34 CST

Dear VMD-L,
  We have just made VMD 1.6.1a3 available for download.
This new version contains 4 new bug fixes since alpha 2,
and is the first release of the new 64-bit versions of VMD
for IRIX and Solaris. The new 64-bit versions allow you to
load trajectory files which are larger than 2GB (gigabytes),
and provide 64-bit memory addressing so that on an appropriately
configured machine, very large molecules or trajectory files
requiring more than 4GB can be loaded and manipulated. A complete
list of updates since the most recent production version VMD 1.6,
is listed below. Your suggestions and feedback are welcome.

Thanks for using VMD!
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

What's new in VMD 1.6.1?
------------------------
  New Features
    o Some builds of VMD now support multiprocessor acceleration and
      multithreading for improved I/O performance even on uniprocessors.
    o Multithreaded IMD socket I/O for improved performance on high latency
      networks and with slow simulations.
    o Support for 64-bit versions of VMD on IRIX 6.x and Solaris 2.x,
      using R10000 class SGI CPUs, and UltraSPARC class Sun CPUs.
      The 64-bit versions are capable of working with files larger than
      2GB, and can use more than 4GB of main memory if necessary.
    o New "getbonds" and "setbonds" commands for Tcl and Python
      atom selections. Replaces older "bond" command.

  General Improvements and Bug Fixes
    o Tcl "atomselect get" speed increased by 10-30x for large molecules for
      numeric selections. String-based selections slightly slower, but
      a good improvement for the common performance intensive use-cases.
    o Increased speed of "lines" representation drawing and animation by
      a factor of 3, allowing interactive rotation of huge systems in lines
      mode (4 million atom water box at 2 seconds per frame.)
    o Increased the number of colors in the color scale map from 16 to 1024.
    o Fixed PRs (bugs): 134, 136, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146,
                        148, 150, 151, 152
    o Fixed a minor EOF failure in G96 file reader

  User Interface Changes
    o the rmsd fit routines can be brought up without needing to source
      a fully qualified pathname in the VMD installation directory

  User Documentation Updates
    o Documented new RMSD fit startup feature 

-- 
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