Hi Calvin,
Ideally Chimera should be run on directly on the Mac, Windows or Linux computer a person is using, not on a server. The program is primarily for highly interactive data analysis and remote display causes latency that makes it a poor experience. Even a few tenths of second lag makes it burdensome to rotate models to desired view points, etc....
Chimera and ChimeraX use OpenGL graphics. OpenGL only works with a window. So unless you have windowing system running it will not render images. Virtual window systems on a server often don't support OpenGL well or at all even with a graphics card. I don't know if CUDA cards do OpenGL rendering, but if so that is even less likely to work with a virtual window system. It has been one or two decades since remote display with X windows of OpenGL worked reliably. Occasionally it can still work if the server and client have exactly the same graphics drivers.
The headless Chimera on Linux is for using Chimera for server applications where the graphical user interface is not used at all. That will only use OSMesa, all software rendering (again since OpenGL is not designed to work without a window).
Sorry our web site is down temporarily this morning due to unexpected server update issues.
Tom
Hello,
I have been trying to find out what the hardware requirements are for Chimera. For example, how can it be run in a cluster environment with CUDA cards, but no Nvidia graphics cards?
Every internal link from that page (like to Downloads) is broken.
Will the broken links be fixed? Is another page the preferred one for Chimera? Do I need the OSMesa version to run without graphics cards?
Thanks,
Calvin Dodge
Calvin Dodge
Systems Analyst
Office: 832-271-7148
Smart Management and Analytics for Clusters