NAMD
NAMD is a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. NAMD scales to hundreds of cores for typical simulations. NAMD uses the popular molecular graphics program VMD, for simulation setup and trajectory analysis, but is also file-compatible with AMBER, CHARMM, and X-PLOR.To see a full list of available versions of NAMD on the cluster, run:
module avail namd/
As of this writing, the latest installed version is 2.13.
Running NAMD on the Cluster
To set up NAMD on the cluster,
module load NAMD/2.13-multicore
for the standard multicore version, or
module load NAMD/2.13-multicore-CUDA
for the GPU-enabled version (about which there is more information below).
NAMD can be run interactively, or as a batch job.
To run NAMD interactively, you need to create an interactive session on a compute node. You could start an interactive session using 4 cores for 4 hours using
salloc --x11 -c 4 -t 4:00:00
For longer simulations, you will generally want to run non-interactively via a batch job.
Parallelization
NAMD is most effective when run with parallelization. For running on a single node,
namd2 +p${SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK} YourConfigfile
where ${SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK} is set by your "-c" job resource request.
NAMD uses charm++ parallel objects for multinode parallelization and the program launch uses the charmrun interface. Setting up a multinode run in a way that provides improved performance can be a complicated undertaking. If you wish to run a multinode NAMD job and are not already familiar with MPI, feel free to contact the YCRC staff for assistance.
GPUs
To use the GPU-accelerated version, request GPU resources for your SLURM job using salloc or via a submission script, and load a CUDA-enabled version of NAMD:
module load NAMD/2.13-multicore-CUDA
For a single-node run, you will need at least one thread for each GPU you want to use:
#SBATCH -c 4 --gpus=4
...
charmrun ++local namd2 +p${SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK} YourConfigfile