Override to submit ab initio or refinement job?

CryoSPARC Live
1

Hi,

Would it be possible to allow for a manual override mechanism to submit ab initio and refinement jobs when one only has two GPUs available?

Basically I would like to have one GPU dedicated to preprocessing, and one to 2D, most of the time.

But if I manually submit an ab initio or refinement job when I only have two GPUs (and hence do not have one to dedicate to ab initio or refinement), I would like Live to inform me that this will pause preprocessing and 2D, run the job, and then return to on the fly pre-processing and 2D once the job completes.

Currently if one only has 2 GPUs that ab initio job will just sit endlessly in the queue unless I manually stop and reconfigure - I think this would be a better way to handle for those with limited GPU resources.

Cheers
Oli

2

Hi @olibclarke, thanks for reporting.
In the current versions of Live, we unfortunately won’t be able to aim for the low-resource use case, but this may change in the future.

3

Thanks @apunjani - I really think it is worth considering though. It isn’t a cost thing so much as an efficiency thing - dedicating four GPUs per microscope to running Live is rather a lot, and the thermals add up as well.

Speaking for myself and the users I have spoken to, number 1 priority is having on-the-fly picking and 2D, and number 2 (but still important!) is having less frequent updates of 3D reconstruction/refinement. Having cryoSPARC intelligently pause preprocessing while a ab initio or refinement job executes would I think be a good compromise that would make Live much more useful on 2-GPU boxes.

Cheers
Oli