[chimerax-users] Specify GPU id for ChimeraX

[Eric Pettersen]

To supplement Guilaume's very helpful answer, you could make an alias to reduce the typing involved, and you could put the alias in your shell startup file.  For the bash shell, the syntax for making an alias named 'cx' for the command would be:

	alias cx="CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1 chimerax"

Other shells have similar (but not necessarily identical) syntaxes.

--Eric

	Eric Pettersen
	UCSF Computer Graphics Lab


> On Nov 24, 2020, at 12:09 AM, Guillaume Gaullier <guillaume at gaullier.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> You can restrict which of your GPUs ChimeraX will be able to detect by starting it from the shell like so:
> 
> CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1 chimerax
> 
> replace 1 with the device number you want, this is the same one as reported by nvidia-smi. This will work until you close ChimeraX, next time you run it you still need to add the environment variable before the "chimerax" command.
> 
> You can also make this environment variable stay around until you close the shell session like so:
> 
> export CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1
> 
> then you can open ChimeraX from the same shell session, close it, and reopen with only the "chimerax" command and it should still only see the GPU you indicated.
> 
> When you close and restart your shell, you will have to export the environment variable again. I don’t recommend adding the export to your ~/.bashrc or other shell initialization script, because then all your shell sessions will have this environment variable set, so all the commands you run will only see this GPU, which is probably not what you want. It is less likely to get in your way down the road if you only set this environment variable for the duration of a shell you opened specifically to run ChimeraX from.
> 
> I hope this helps,
> 
> Guillaume
> 
> 
>> On 24 Nov 2020, at 01:51, Shasha Feng <shaalltime at gmail.com <mailto:shaalltime at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Tom,
>> 
>> Sorry about not clarifying my operating system. I am using ubuntu 20.04 with two NVIDIA GPU cards. 
>> Do I need to change OpenGL setting or reconfigure the nvidia setting? 
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Shasha
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 6:58 PM Tom Goddard <goddard at sonic.net <mailto:goddard at sonic.net>> wrote:
>> Hi Shasta,
>> 
>> ChimeraX has no way to select which GPU it uses.   The operating system or opengl driver decides.  You didn't mention which operating system you are using.  Here is an example of how to set the default OpenGL GPU in Windows.
>> 
>> 	https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/pc-components/how-set-default-graphics-card-3612668/ <https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/pc-components/how-set-default-graphics-card-3612668/>
>> 
>>   Tom
>> 
>> 
>>> On Nov 23, 2020, at 2:38 PM, Shasha Feng <shaalltime at gmail.com <mailto:shaalltime at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Is there any way to specify which GPU device for ChimeraX to run on? Currently, it uses the default GPU 0, which can disturb the existing jobs. Thanks.
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> Shasha
>>> 
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>> 
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