Fast analytical computation of Richard's smooth molecular surface

Abstract

An algorithm for rapid computation of Richards's smooth molecular surface is described. The entire surface is computed analytically, triangulated, and displayed at interactive rates. The faster speeds for our program have been achieved by algorithmic improvements, parallelizing the computations, and by taking advantage of the special geometrical properties of such surfaces. Our algorithm is easily parallelizable and it has a time complexity of O(k log k) over n processors, where n is the number of atoms of the molecule and k is the average number of neighbors per atom.