3 ms·
Me of fifteen years ago would love this for lab classes on, e.g., classical molecular dynamics. The computational load of these simulations is, in modern terms
by genericpseudo 9y ago
Me of fifteen years ago would love this for lab classes on, e.g., classical molecular dynamics.
The computational load of these simulations is, in modern terms, not large, so Emscripten-compiled simulations would be plenty fast enough, and deployment of web pages in a computer-lab environment (or for people working from their dorms!) is way easier than the alternatives.
So there are real, non-trivial applications. You wouldn't want to be running ABINIT or whatever in your web browser, but GROMACS on some small system? Not unreasonable.
- infinite8s 9y agoFor classroom study - wouldn't straight javascript suffice for basic classical molecular dynamics? That approach would also make it much easier for students to play around with different update algorithms, temperature control, etc.
- genericpseudo 9y agoThat would involve a) writing yourself an engine and that's actual work b) that engine not being one which is used in real research So "it depends" – for introductory teaching yes, for training researchers less so.
- goatlover 9y agoTeachers can utilize Jupyter notebooks today.
- luthaf 9y agoYep, I will definitively try to compile my Rust MD code to emscripten and give it a look! There are quite a few JS molecules visualizers, so the outcome can be pretty nice for teaching.