On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Geoffrey Hutchison
<[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm a Phd student and I'll have to do 'systematic research of rotors' even 
>> for much larger molecules.
>
> You may want to investigate the genetic-algorithm and Monte Carlo weighted 
> search options in Open Babel (which are used by Avogadro). These can be 
> accessed from the babel command-line and GUI.
>
> http://openbabel.org/docs/dev/Command-line_tools/babel.html#generating-conformers-for-structures

I agree with Geoff -- that molecule would generate quite a few
conformers, at least 10,000 (the GUI cuts off there -- there are
probably many more potential conformers for this flexible of a
molecule). I started the search and within seconds the search had
consumed over 2GB of RAM to store the conformer data. This is probably
what caused your crash -- if I had not stopped avogadro on my system,
I would have quickly run out of memory and crashed, too.

Unfortunately Avogadro doesn't currently have any utilities to
generate this many conformers in a memory efficient way, which would
require writing to disk as more conformers generated. Your options
here are to use a different search algorithm (random/Monte Carlo or
GA) to try just sampling some of the conformational space, or try to
find a computer with an enormous RAM reserve.

If you really do need to generate all 10,000+ conformers, you'll
probably need to use the commandline openbabel interface. The Avogadro
interface is only capable of generating 10,000 conformers. I doubt
that the raw babel CLI interface has such a restriction, but I'm not
100% sure on that.

Hope this helps,

Dave

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