VMD - Visual Molecular Dynamics

VMD is a molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing large biomolecular systems using 3-D graphics and built-in scripting. VMD supports computers running MacOS-X, Unix, or Windows, is distributed free of charge, and includes source code.
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Spotlight

Since its inception, VMD was designed to take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs) for interactive renderings of large biomolecular complexes. Recently, GPUs have become programmable and their massive parallel processing capabilities can now be utilized for non-graphical computations. VMD makes uses of this type GPU-based parallel computation to greatly accelerate calculation of electrostatic potential fields, used for visualization and analysis, as well as and modeling operations such as ion placement. Ongoing VMD development efforts will expand the use of GPU acceleration even further, for acceleration of volumetric processing, structure and trajectory analysis, and compute-limited operations performed within VMD and it's plugins. More information on GPU acceleration of molecular modeling applications is provided here.
Other Spotlights
Placement of ions in the ribosome

image size:
made with VMD

Overview

Molecular representations
Supported molecular file formats
GPU-accelerated computing
Interactive molecular dynamics
Required software
Programs that use VMD
VMD publications
How to cite VMD, Papers citing VMD

Download

Download (all versions)
VMD 1.8.6 (MacOS-X, Unix, Windows)
VMD plugin library
VMD script library
License, Copyright and Disclaimer

Documentation and Support

User and installation guides
Quick help
FAQ
VMD-L mailing list
Bug List

News and Announcements

2009 VMD Calendar
VMD/NAMD at SC2008 conference, Nov 15-21, 2008
NVIDIA Appoints First CUDA Center of Excellence
Using VMD - an introductory tutorial Current Protocols - Bioinformatics, 2009. In press.
Membrane Structural Biology book cover made with VMD
GPU accelerated cutoff pair potentials paper, ACM Computing Frontiers, pp. 273-282, 2008
GPU Computing paper, Proceedings of the IEEE, 96:879-899, 2008
J. Comp. Chemistry cover image made with VMD
GPU-accelerated molecular modeling paper, J. Comp. Chem, 28:2618-2640, 2007
Nature Biotechnology cover image made with VMD (Jul 2007)
VMD 1.8.6 (MacOS-X, Unix, Windows) (Apr 2007)
VMD outline rendering style inspired by the work of David S. Goodsell (Apr 2007)
Create 3-D PDFs with VMD and Acrobat3D (Feb 2007)
Advanced VMD/Tachyon figure rendering (Feb 2007)
VMD Images and Movies Tutorial (Jan 2007)
Past announcements

Gallery

Gallery of Posters, Images, and Movies made with VMD
Events and tutorial picture gallery

Development

VMD User Survey Results
VMD development status and pre-release test downloads
CVS source code access
VMD Programmer's documentation

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