Subject: Quanta etc.

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 1997 22:50:05 +0100 (MET)

Hi Modellers.

The last few days, a lot of messages about the use of Quanta on
non-SGI machines appeared on the CCL.  We have quanta running
on a dedicated SGI box, and I tried to run it over the net once,
setting the display to another SGI machine. This does work, but
it is useless, because it is horrendously slow.
The main conclusion from the postings in my opinion therefore is:
Quanta is usable only on your local SGI box

Although we have a lot of SGIs around our lab, and they work nicely,
they are certainly not the fastest workstations you can buy. Furthermore,
there are many alternatives to large parts of Quanta in public domain 
(FREE) software packages.

Although these packages may require some more work to get running,
but you can run the software on any machine you like.  Some examples:
Visualisation: check out VMD (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu)
Molecular Dynamics: check out GROMACS (http://rugmd0.chem.rug.nl/~gmx)
Ab Initio: check out GAMESS 
To conclude, spend your money on fast hardware, so you can do more science.

David,
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Ir. David van der Spoel	Dept. of Biophysical Chemistry
s-mail:	Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands.
e-mail:	[email-masked]	www:	http://rugmd0.chem.rug.nl/~spoel
phone:	31-50-3634327		fax: 	31-50-3634800
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