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.
(more details...)

Spotlight

Modern computers include a massively parallel graphics processing unit (GPU) designed to perform geometry and lighting calculations at blistering speeds. State of the art GPUs can perform 0.5 teraFLOPS with their hundred cores. The tremendous computational power of GPUs was untapped by scientific computations because it could only be accessed with difficulty until now. As reported in the Journal of Computational Chemistry, recent advances allowing GPUs to be used for general purpose computing have boosted the performance of a number of molecular modeling applications, including NAMD simulations and VMD electrostatic potential calculations. The accelerated versions of these applications run five to one hundred times faster than on the best CPU-based hardware, allowing a single desktop computer equipped with a GPU to provide processing power equivalent to an entire, large computing cluster. 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

footer