In this post I will be compiling NAMD from source for good performance on modern GPU accelerated Workstation hardware. Doing a custom NAMD build from source code gives a moderate but significant boost in performance. This can be important considering that large simulations over many time-steps can run for days or weeks. I wanted to do some custom NAMD builds to ensure that that modern Workstation hardware was being well utilized. I include some results for the STMV benchmark showing the custom build performance boost. I’ve included some results using NVIDIA 1080Ti and Titan V GPU’s as well as an “experimental” build using an Ubuntu 18.04 base.
The Best Way To Install Ubuntu 16.04 with NVIDIA Drivers and CUDA
In this post I’ll be going over details of Installing Ubuntu 16.04 including the NVIDIA display driver and, optionally, NVIDIA CUDA. I have found the method presented here to be the most likely to succeed no matter what hardware configuration you are installing onto.