Remote Services for Model Building in Macromolecular Crystallography

A server to run remote ARP/wARP jobs for automated model building in macromolecular crystallography was set up at EMBL-Hamburg, based on a 16 processor Linux Cluster.The project aimed to provide a user-friendly service for macromolecular crystallographers, with the following intentions: 1) to allow users to go far beyond routine data acqusition.2) to obtain data for software development and project tracking 3) to provide users with the latest executables 4). to provide users with CPU power.The server was opened to the community in July 2004.This paper will describe the way remote job submission is carried out.An example will be given to lead the reader through the process.Statistics on the number of jobs run at the cluster, type and frequency of software and hardware errors, and a variety of other lessons learnt will be presented.Plans for scaling up and improvement of the services will also be described.