I first used an Apple Mac when I was eight. Apart from a brief period in the 1990s when I had a PC laptop I’ve used them ever since. Until last year I had an old MacPro which had four PCI slots so you could add a GPU-capable NVIDIA card, although you were limited by […]
In much of my research I’ve looked at how proteins embedded in cell membranes behave. An important part in any simulation of a membrane protein is, obviously, putting it into a model membrane, often a square patch of several hundred lipid molecules. This is surprisingly difficult: although a slew of methods have been published, none of […]
GROMACS is an optimised molecular dynamics code, primarily used for simulating the behaviour of proteins. To compile GROMACS you need, well, some compilers. I install gcc using MacPorts. Note that this requires you to first install Xcode. Then it is easy to install gcc version 4.9 by sudo port install gcc49 (and yes, I know […]
I’m teaching a short tutorial on how to analyse membrane protein simulations next week at the University of Bristol as part of a series arranged by CCPBioSim. As it is only 90 minutes long, it only covers two simple tasks but I show how you can do both with MDAnalysis (a python module) or in […]
I mentioned before that I would write something on running GROMACS on GPUs. Let’s imagine we want to simulate a solvated lipid bilayer containing 6,000 lipids for 5 µs. The total number of MARTINI coarse-grained beads is around 137,000 and the box dimensions are roughly 42x42x11 nm. Although this is smaller than the benchmark we […]
So if I have a particular system I want to simulate, how many processing cores can I harness to run a single GROMACS version 4.6 job? If I only use a few then the simulation will take a long time to finish, if I use too many the cores will end up waiting for communications […]