VMD-L Mailing List

From: Miro Astore (miro.astore_at_gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jan 09 2020 - 03:07:13 CST

Hello all,

I have noticed that on my systems that have no access to a GPU vmd starts
up an order of magnitude faster. When I need to script a large number of
functions, parsing data between vmd scripts and python and bash it would be
preferable to be able to use the CPU only type of vmd. I have tried to
compile VMD removing flags I think are GPU related but this results in
either the same behavior or a non working install. I've also played around
with the environmental variables
https://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.9.1/ug/node208.html

I'm sure there is a better way of doing this, just wondering what I'm
missing.

Best, Miro

proof: time vmd takes to start up and exit
command: time vmd -dispdev text -e exit.tcl
low powered cpu only laptop
real 0m0.156s
user 0m0.046s
sys 0m0.048s
workstation with GPU installed:
real 0m2.184s
user 0m1.993s
sys 0m0.169s

contents of exit.tcl: "exit"