Re: Ras Mol...

Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Sat, 2 Aug 1997 11:57:02 +0200 (MET DST)


On Fri, 1 Aug 1997, Prof. Jose Gomes Filho wrote:

> For those who play with chem and biochem, I discovered today I've got
> a copy of Rasmol 2.5 (Glaxo Research), a simple molecule 3d
> viewer, with various options... If anyb wants... just say... ( I lost
> the http...)

Rasmol is a pdb viewer, and comes bundled with many Linux distributions.
The display is very fast under a decent Pentium, noticeably faster than
on a vanilla SGI Indy. Btw Linux, 3dfx has just released a glide library
for Linux, and OpenGL libraries for major 3d accelerators are in the
works (at last!). Future looks bleak for SGI, whatever they do say.

Viewing stuff is nice (indeed, crucial), but doing molecular modelling is
even more important. Modern machines and codes had grown good enough to
do nontrivial level work at home. If you consider that a single 8-CPU
SHARC card gives you about 1 GFlop (judging from raw silicon prices, such
a board ought to cost around 2 k$). Porting a nanokernel with Unix
personality to it (e.g. L3/L4) would mean serious _compatible_ MPI/PVM
computing power. 1 GFlop/320 MIPS single-user is a lot.

'gene
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