VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 19 2014 - 23:54:59 CDT

Hi,
  We haven't run VMD on IRIX for almost 10 years now, so it
would be hard to make a concrete suggestion here. To my knowledge,
the main benefit of multiple CPUs for the old IRIX versions of VMD
would be to allow X-windows and other apps to run on other processors
while the VMD OpenGL rendering activity ran flat out on its own CPU.
IRIX had a good SMP implementation for its day, and there are many areas
in the IRIX kernel that benefited from having multiple CPUs.
If you were to try and run a somewhat more modern version of VMD
on IRIX, you would get a performance benefit from the use of multithreading
in VMD itself. The most recent revs of VMD have eliminated all of the
old IRIX-specific #ifdefs and OpenGL code, so I think you would have
to stick to something like VMD 1.8.7 or thereabouts.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 10:25:46PM -0500, tyrrell t wrote:
> For instance, would having more than one cpu increase rendering
> performance? I can't seem to find any information or a definitive yes/no
> on this. ( The machine I have only has one CPU at current, but I was
> thinking about upgrading it, and no one I know uses IRIX anymore. )
>
> also:
> If anyone has any VMD benchmark data in regards to vpro vs
> InfiniteReality, I would be interested in looking at it. 

-- 
NIH Center 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/