Tips for remote use

[Tristan Croll]

With the current rapidly-evolving situation, there's suddenly a whole lot of new interest from people wanting to run ChimeraX (and ISOLDE) remotely. I myself will be locked out of my building as of Monday, with no clear idea for how long. Of course, I have my own GPU laptop to work with - but there are many others who don't. For one, the PhD student downstairs who's desperate to finalise his cryo-EM model of respiratory complex I. Anyway, I was thinking it would be a really good idea to put together a page covering the options. A few thoughts:

• I'm aware that Linux remote virtual desktop is out of the question due to failure to update to OpenGL 3. But I did come across these HDMI dummy plugs on Amazon: ​https://www.amazon.co.uk/Headless-Display-Emulator-Headless-1920x1080-generation/dp/B072PV6K8J. They're designed to fool the server into thinking it has a real screen attached, so it can run a normal X session and share that display via (e.g.) VNC. That should work, should it not?

• What about Amazon Web Services and other cloud computing options? Have you tried any of them out for ChimeraX? Looks like the "sweet spot" for something like ISOLDE would be AWS's g4dn.xlarge (1 Nvidia T4 GPU, 4 CPU cores, $0.526/h). Don't know if they have a way around the remote desktop limitations in Linux, or whether they'd need to be running Windows.

[goddard@…]

It is hard to run OpenGL apps on a server that has no display because OpenGL requires a window.  Also servers tend to have Intel Xeon processors which do not include a GPU so graphics would not be hardware accelerated, unusable for ISOLDE.

The obvious solution is to run remotely on a desktop PC which has a display and use any of the screen sharing options available to remote display the desktop.  I use VNC and macOS Catalina screen sharing (enabled under macOS Settings / Sharing) and ChimeraX is usable.  Latency can be a problem and likely will be for ISOLDE.  Windows also has plenty of screen sharing options, but I have not used any so cannot advise.  I don't know the screen sharing options on Linux.

[goddard@…]

My best recommendation would be to pack up a desktop from work and haul it home if at all possible.  ChimeraX is intended to be run locally and trying to run it remotely will be frustrating.

[Tom Goddard]

In general my recommendation for running ChimeraX remotely is "Don't do it". To run remotely you have to have a computer locally to display and you should just run ChimeraX on that local computer. If the local computer is not powerful enough, that is a rare case, basically only ISOLDE needs GPU. Running ISOLDE remotely is going to be very unpleasant due to latency using screen sharing.

I don't see where I would put any advice like this that someone would actually see.