[Chimera-users] Chimera on x86_64?

[Ben Webb]

Thomas Goddard wrote:
>   There's no technical obstacle to us making regular 64-bit linux Chimera
> distributions.  The only issue is having time to do it.
...
>   Could you give me a better sense of how much need there is in the
> Sali lab?  Are you really saying you would not install 32-bit Linux
> system libraries except for Chimera?  I would think there are a fair
> number of applications out there with binary distributions only for
> 32-bit.

Yes, of course there are a handful of other applications (mostly ancient 
and unsupported codes) which require a 32-bit glibc. But it's really 
only Chimera which needs all of the X libraries etc. to get pulled in.

> The other problem you point out is that 32-bit Chimera Python
> cannot use your own 64-bit Python modules.  Are you using additional
> C Python modules within Chimera that do not come with Chimera?  That
> is interesting -- what are they?

We've already discussed using our MODELLER package in combination with 
Chimera. The next public release of MODELLER will primarily be made 
available as a Python module, and we are exploring the options for using 
this directly with Chimera (rather than having it generate input files 
and run a subprocess). This works just fine for 32-bit, but not for 
x86_64 unless we build Modeller as a 32-bit application. Given the large 
performance boost we've seen for our x86_64 builds vs. i386, we are 
rather reluctant to do that.

	Ben
-- 
ben at salilab.org                      http://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
	- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle