[Chimera-users] Computational power requirement

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Pascal,

  I'd suggest having 8 Gbytes of memory, although 16 Gb would be better.  With big maps (say 500 x 500 x 500) grid points and fitting a few hundred thousand atoms you can use over 4 Gbytes of memory and performance can get poor if you have too little memory for all the apps running on your machine. Chimera is single-threaded so multiple cores won't help much, except to avoid resource contention with other running applications.  On-board intel graphics is quite reasonable for medium size maps and tens of thousands of atoms, but for your larger systems an Nvidia or AMD gaming type mid-range graphics cards ($100) will be much (2 -  5 times) faster to rotate and move the models.  This web page shows how well various graphics cards perform with Chimera

	http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/benchmarks <http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/benchmarks>

If you wanted some really fast graphics, a Geforce GTX 970 for $300 is a good deal.

	http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html <http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html>

  Tom


> On Mar 15, 2016, at 2:54 AM, Pascal Albanese wrote:
> 
> Dear staff,
> we need some advice about the computational power required by the software to perform several operations/processing with big volumes obtained by cryoEM at high resolution. For example the fitting of several pdb crystal structure (n=20-30) into a single volume at high resolution of a protein complex (MW > 1.2 MDa).
> What kind of graphics power do we'll need to run Chimera properly with this kind of structures? and CPU/RAM performance?
> If you have any suggestion.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help,
> 
> all the best,
> 
> Pascal
> 
> -- 
> Pascal Albanese, 
> PhD student, Università di Padova
> Via Ugo Bassi 58 B, 35121 Padova, Italy
> 
> Research assistant, Politecnico di Torino
> Dipartimento DISAT, BioSolar Lab
> Viale Teresa Michel 5, 15121 Alessandria, Italy
> 
> Tel: 0131 229301 Fax: 0131 229344
> 
> 
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