YASARA for MacOS
With release of the first
ARM-based Macs in November 2020, Apple finalized a
development that has been obvious during the years before:
their plan to give up on compute-intensive scientific
workloads, and focus on highly efficient mobile solutions
instead.
Our goal to bring you the
highest possible performance can only be reached by
abundant use of the CPU's SIMD instruction set (SSE/AVX),
which makes it impossible to simply recompile YASARA for
ARM-based Macs. Instead, a considerable amount of porting
work is involved to support the ARM equivalent called
'Neon'.
We evaluated the option to
simply fade out YASARA for Mac, but decided against it.
The scenario where a YASARA user does the hard work on a
Linux/Windows machine or on a remote cluster, but wants to
look at the results on a MacBook while travelling is just
too common to ignore it. In addition, Apple is working on
CPUs with more cores, that may one day provide
state-of-the-art performance when delivered in a
large-enough case to be combined with the best GPUs from
AMD or nVIDIA.
As a consequence, we decided
to stick with our approach from 2007, when we set the
YASARA price tag for MacOS 20% higher to finance the
unfortunate combination of a small user base and many
technical difficulties below the shiny surface of MacOS.
The port of YASARA to ARM/Neon was released in September
2023, and yielded a 50% performance jump. The CPU-only
DHFR molecular dynamics benchmark running on an Apple
MacBook Air from 2020 with 4 performance and 4 efficiency
cores improved from 75 ns/day (using Rosetta-2 emulation)
to 125 ns/day (using native ARM Neon code).
As before, you get an
application that is specifically tailored to MacOS,
including special support for the MacBook track pad
gestures, the Magic Mouse and multi-monitor
configurations. By default, YASARA is delivered as a
universal binary that runs optimally on Intel- and
ARM-based Macs, but you can save disk space by choosing
your Processor on the download pages.
In addition, there are two ways to avoid the price
premium:
- As soon as your summed up contribution to YASARA
development exceeds 1000 EUR (academic) or 5000 EUR
(commercial), no more MacOS price premium will be asked.
- If you help grow the YASARA MacOS user base by
pointing your colleagues to this site, the price premium
will be removed entirely as soon as there are enough
users. The current ratio Windows:Linux:MacOS is 55:33:12
(in 2020, was 51:37:12 in 2016, 49:36:14 in 2014,
47:39:14 in 2011, 51:37:12 in 2009, and 57:41:2 in
2008), and MacOS should reach up to either Linux or
Windows.
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