Throughout my PhD I’ve needed nice PyMOL visualizations, but struggled to quickly and easily make the pictures I wanted. I’ve used Claire Marks‘ blopig post, Making Pretty Pictures in PyMOL, many times and wanted to expand it with what I’ve learned to make satisfying visualizations quickly!
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Controlling PyMol from afar
Do you keep downloading .pdb and .sdf files and loading them into PyMol repeatedly?
If yes, then PyMol remote might be just for you. With PyMol remote, you can control a PyMol session running on your laptop from any other machine. For example, from a Jupyter Notebook running on your HPC cluster.
Continue readingBuilding CLI Applications with Typer
Remember the last time you had to build a command-line tool? If you’re like me, you probably started with argparse or click, wrote boilerplate code, and still ended up with something that felt clunky. That’s where typer comes in – it’s a game-changer that lets you build CLI apps with minimal code. Although there are several other options, typer stands out because it leverages Python’s type hints to do the heavy lifting. No more manual argument parsing! The following snippet shows how to use typer in its simplest form:
import typer
app = typer.Typer()
@app.command()
def hello(name: str):
typer.echo(f"Hello {name}!")
if __name__ == "__main__":
app()
And you will be able to execute it with just:
$ python hello.py Pedro Hello Pedro!
In this simple example, we were only defining positional arguments, but having optional arguments is as easy as setting default values in the function signature.
Continue readingCross referencing across LaTeX documents in one project
A common scenario we come across is that we have a main manuscript document and a supplementary information document, each of which have their own sections, tables and figures. The question then becomes – how do we effectively cross-reference between the documents without having to tediously count all the numbers ourselves every time we make a change and recompile the documents?
The answer: cross referencing!
Continue readingUsing Jupyter on a remote slurm cluster
Suppose we need to do some interactive analysis in a Jupyter notebook, but our local machine lacks the power. We have access to a slurm cluster, but we can’t SSH from the head node to the worker node; we can only SSH from the worker node to the head node. Can we still interact with a Jupyter notebook running on the worker node? As it happens, the answer is “yes” – we just need to do some reverse SSH tunnelling.
Continue readingBig Compute doesnt want you to know this! Maximising GPU Usage with CUDA MPS
Accelerating Simulations with CUDA MPS: An OpenMM Implementation Guide
Introduction
High-performance molecular dynamics simulations often require running concurrent simulations on GPUs. However, traditional GPU resource allocation can lead to inefficient utilization when running multiple processes, with users often resorting to using multiple GPUs to achieve this. While parrallelsing across nodes can improve time to solution, many processes require coordination and hence communication which quickly becomes a bottleneck. This is exacerbated with more powerful hardware as internal node communication for a single simulation on a single GPU can also become a bottleneck. This problem has been addressed for CPU parrallelism with multiprocessing and multithreading but previously this was challenging to do this efficiently on GPUs.
NVIDIA’s Multi-Process Service (MPS) offers a solution by enabling efficient and easy sharing of GPU resources among multiple processes with just a few commands. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to implement CUDA MPS with Python multiprocessing and OpenMM to accelerate molecular dynamics simulations.
Continue readingCream, Compression, and Complexity: Notes from a Coffee-Induced Rabbit Hole
I have recently stumbled upon this paper which, quite unexpectedly, sent me down a rabbit hole reading about compression, generalisation, algorithmic information theory and looking at gifs of milk mixing with coffee on the internet. Here are some half-processed takeaways from this weird journey.
Complexity of a cup of Coffee
First, check out this cool video.
OP-uns
As a long-standing social sec of the OPIG research group, the key part of the job is to ensure that the event name includes some kind of pun around OPIG (and then maybe organise something). Notable ones include OPIGmas, the annual Christmas party that I am neglecting to organise at the moment, and O’Punting, our annual punting trip. For the next generation of social secs, I have proposed some new activities with even worse names.
Continue readingMaybe we should train on our test set?
One of the fundamental (pitfalls) of machine learning is to ensure that you don’t train on your test set, but what if I told you that you could?
The “AI-ntibody” Competition: benchmarking in silico antibody screening/design
We recently contributed to a communication in Nature Biotechnology detailing an upcoming competition coordinated by Specifica to evaluate the relative performance of in vitro display and in silico methods at identifying target-specific antibody binders and performing downstream antibody candidate optimisation.
Following in the footsteps of tournaments such as the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP), which have led to substantial breakthroughs in computational methods for biomolecular structure prediction, the AI-ntibody initiative seeks to establish a periodic benchmarking exercise for in silico antibody discovery/design methods. It should help to identify the most significant breakthroughs in the space and orient future methods’ development.
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