Scipion

To use the Scipion module, first add it to your environment. Use:

module spider Scipion

to see which versions are available and how to load the module and the needed prerequisites.

You can read more about loading modules on our Accessing software with Lmod page and our Using modules (Lmod) page.

Scipion is best used with its graphical frontend. To use the graphical frontend one should login to our Thinlinc based login node, see our support page for how to use thinlinc.

Setup

After loading the Scipion module, do

scipion config

This will create a scipion.conf file in $HOME/.config/scipion

Scipion also uses a separate directory for storing the projects in, the directory is defined in your scipion.conf file.

We recommend changing the SCIPION_USER_DATA definition in that file to use a directory in your project storage.

Differences in the GUI from standard installations

At HPC2N we have modified how to run the different protocols to be able to use the batch system more efficiently. When opening a Scipion protocol definition, the "Host" field have multiple entries.

The "localhost" entry can be used to run shorter, non-cpu intensive tasks, on the login node, or submit tasks to the batch system and run on CPUs only, good for any protocol that doesn't utilize GPU resources. There is also a "GPU_batch_job" entry that can be used to submit GPU based tasks to the batch system.

When submitting tasks to the batch system one have to fill in the "project id" field. When using the "GPU_batch_job" selection one also have to choose which of the two GPU types to run on by selecting either the "GPU - K80" or the "GPU - V100" queue. Please read the support pages regarding how to use the GPU resources at HPC2N.

NOTE: Motioncor2 currently has a bug when running on the V100 GPUs and produces bad output. Use the K80s instead.