What is VMD?

Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) is a molecular graphics program designed for the interactive visualization and analysis of biopolymers such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and membranes. It is developed and freely distributed (for academic use) by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For more details, please consult the VMD Home page.

Usage of VMD at LRZ

The environment modules package controls access to the software. Use "module avail vmd" to find all available versions of VMD installed at LRZ.

To use the default version of VMD, please type:

> module load vmd

You can either start VMD on the login nodes of Linux-Cluster & SuperMUC-NG or by using our remote visualization service (via VNC). We however want to note that the graphics performance on the login nodes is comparatively poor. Therefore, we recommend our users to only start VMD on the login nodes for less demanding visualisations of e.g. small molecules. To visualize larger data sets or to run more demanding VMD extensions, please use our remote visualization service (via VNC) which will grant you entire access to the reserved "localhost" node including GPU resources.

To start VMD graphical user interface, simply type:

> vmd

Documentation

Please consult the VMD Home page for documentation.

Support

If you have any questions or problems with VMD installed at LRZ platforms, please don't hesitate to contact LRZ HPC support staff.