Greetings. My name is Subhasree Ghosh, and I am currently working on developing expertise in cryo-EM to complement my background in structural biology and computational methods. I am very interested in using CryoSPARC for practice and training purposes, particularly with the tutorials offered through your platform.
However, I am currently using a Windows-based system and understand that CryoSPARC is primarily supported on Linux. I would greatly appreciate any guidance on how best to access CryoSPARC from my Windows system. Specifically, I am interested in learning if there are recommended methods to set up CryoSPARC on Windows, or if there is an online platform where I can access the software directly for practice.
Additionally, if there are specific resources, remote environments, or training sessions that would allow me to complete tutorials online, I would be grateful for any information you could provide.
Thank you very much for your time and assistance.
Best
Subhasree
Welcome to the forum.
There has been some success with getting CryoSPARC to run on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 but no activity recently. (Each word is a different link…)
The requirements don’t change, you still need Linux (it will not work on Windows natively or MacOS at all) an nVidia GPU and lots of memory. More than a “normal” Windows system. If you’re not running at least a 3080Ti/4080 with 128GB RAM and a 16-core CPU, I wouldn’t bother due to increased overheads of running in WSL2. The (modern) nVidia GPU is non-negotiable. Nothing else will work. It needs to have at least 8GB of VRAM, and that will require some adjustment to defaults sometimes as CryoSPARC 4.4 increased requirements dramatically so some things simply won’t work. 16GB or 24GB VRAM would be better.
And if you do have that, frankly I would still recommend installing Linux, just to save yourself the pain of troubleshooting an unsupported configuration while simultaneously trying to learn image processing in CryoSPARC.
Assuming you have a valid license, you could hire an AWS instance with nVidia GPU and set it up there, but that is going to be a very expensive option very quickly, just to run some tutorials. I remember there was a guide to getting CryoSPARC running on AWS but I’ve not paid much attention to it personally. However, there are some more recent guides available here, here, here and here which may be of use and/or interest.
I’m not aware of any online resources which allow access to CryoSPARC anonymously as it would near certainly fall foul of the licensing agreement.
However, cryo-EM training courses are often run all over the world, attending one of them may be the most robust option available, especially if just entering into the field.
Good luck!
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