You will need a machine running Linux; AlphaFold 3 does not support other operating systems. Full installation requires up to 1 TB of disk space to keep genetic databases (SSD storage is recommended) and an NVIDIA GPU with Compute Capability 8.0 or greater (GPUs with more memory can predict larger protein structures). We have verified that inputs with up to 5,120 tokens can fit on a single NVIDIA A100 80 GB, or a single NVIDIA H100 80 GB. We have verified numerical accuracy on both NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs.
Especially for long targets, the genetic search stage can consume a lot of RAM – we recommend running with at least 64 GB of RAM.
We provide installation instructions for a machine with an NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPU and a clean Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installation, and expect that these instructions should aid others with different setups.
The instructions provided below describe how to:
- Provision a machine on GCP.
- Install Docker.
- Install NVIDIA drivers for an A100.
- Obtain genetic databases.
- Obtain model parameters.
- Build the AlphaFold 3 Docker container or Singularity image.
Clean Ubuntu images are available on Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and other major platforms.
We first provisioned a new machine in Google Cloud Platform using the following command. We were using a Google Cloud project that was already set up.
- We recommend using
--machine-type a2-ultragpu-1g
but feel free to use--machine-type a2-highgpu-1g
for smaller predictions. - If desired, replace
--zone us-central1-a
with a zone that has quota for the machine you have selected. See gpu-regions-zones.
gcloud compute instances create alphafold3 \
--machine-type a2-ultragpu-1g \
--zone us-central1-a \
--image-family ubuntu-2204-lts \
--image-project ubuntu-os-cloud \
--maintenance-policy TERMINATE \
--boot-disk-size 1000 \
--boot-disk-type pd-balanced
This provisions a bare Ubuntu 22.04 LTS image on an A2 Ultra machine with 12 CPUs, 170 GB RAM, 1 TB disk and NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPU attached. We verified the following installation steps from this point.
These instructions are for rootless Docker.
Note these instructions only apply to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS images, see above.
Add Docker's official GPG key. Official Docker instructions are here. The commands we ran are:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
Add the repository to apt sources:
echo \
"deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
sudo docker run hello-world
Official Docker instructions are here. The commands we ran are:
sudo apt-get install -y uidmap systemd-container
sudo machinectl shell $(whoami)@ /bin/bash -c 'dockerd-rootless-setuptool.sh install && sudo loginctl enable-linger $(whoami) && DOCKER_HOST=unix:///run/user/1001/docker.sock docker context use rootless'
Official Ubuntu instructions are here. The commands we ran are:
sudo apt-get -y install alsa-utils ubuntu-drivers-common
sudo ubuntu-drivers install
sudo nvidia-smi --gpu-reset
nvidia-smi # Check that the drivers are installed.
Accept "Pending kernel upgrade" dialog if it appears.
You will need to reboot the instance with sudo reboot now
to reset the GPU if
you see the following warning:
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver.
Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.
Proceed only if nvidia-smi
has a sensible output.
Official NVIDIA instructions are here. The commands we ran are:
curl -fsSL https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/gpgkey | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg \
&& curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/stable/deb/nvidia-container-toolkit.list | \
sed 's#deb https://#deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg] https://#g' | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-container-toolkit.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-container-toolkit
nvidia-ctk runtime configure --runtime=docker --config=$HOME/.config/docker/daemon.json
systemctl --user restart docker
sudo nvidia-ctk config --set nvidia-container-cli.no-cgroups --in-place
Check that your container can see the GPU:
docker run --rm --gpus all nvidia/cuda:12.6.0-base-ubuntu22.04 nvidia-smi
The output should look similar to this:
Mon Nov 11 12:00:00 2024
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 550.120 Driver Version: 550.120 CUDA Version: 12.6 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA A100-SXM4-80GB Off | 00000000:00:05.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 34C P0 51W / 400W | 1MiB / 81920MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
You will need to have git
installed to download the AlphaFold 3 repository:
git clone https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold3.git
This step requires curl
and zstd
to be installed on your machine.
AlphaFold 3 needs multiple genetic (sequence) protein and RNA databases to run:
- BFD small
- MGnify
- PDB (structures in the mmCIF format)
- PDB seqres
- UniProt
- UniRef90
- NT
- RFam
- RNACentral
We provide a Python program fetch_databases.py
that can be used to download
and set up all of these databases. This process takes around 45 minutes when not
installing on local SSD. We recommend running the following in a screen
or
tmux
session as downloading and decompressing the databases takes some time.
cd alphafold3 # Navigate to the directory with cloned AlphaFold 3 repository.
python3 fetch_databases.py --download_destination=<DATABASES_DIR>
This script downloads the databases from a mirror hosted on GCS, with all versions being the same as used in the AlphaFold 3 paper.
📒 Note: The download directory <DATABASES_DIR>
should not be a
subdirectory in the AlphaFold 3 repository directory. If it is, the Docker
build will be slow as the large databases will be copied during the image
creation.
📒 Note: The total download size for the full databases is around 252 GB
and the total size when unzipped is 630 GB. Please make sure you have sufficient
hard drive space, bandwidth, and time to download. We recommend using an SSD for
better genetic search performance, and faster runtime of fetch_databases.py
.
📒 Note: If the download directory and datasets don't have full read and
write permissions, it can cause errors with the MSA tools, with opaque
(external) error messages. Please ensure the required permissions are applied,
e.g. with the sudo chmod 755 --recursive <DATABASES_DIR>
command.
Once the script has finished, you should have the following directory structure:
pdb_2022_09_28_mmcif_files.tar # ~200k PDB mmCIF files in this tar.
bfd-first_non_consensus_sequences.fasta
mgy_clusters_2022_05.fa
nt_rna_2023_02_23_clust_seq_id_90_cov_80_rep_seq.fasta
pdb_seqres_2022_09_28.fasta
rfam_14_9_clust_seq_id_90_cov_80_rep_seq.fasta
rnacentral_active_seq_id_90_cov_80_linclust.fasta
uniprot_all_2021_04.fa
uniref90_2022_05.fa
To request access to the AlphaFold 3 model parameters, please complete this form. Access will be granted at Google DeepMind’s sole discretion. We will aim to respond to requests within 2–3 business days. You may only use AlphaFold 3 model parameters if received directly from Google. Use is subject to these terms of use.
Then, build the Docker container. This builds a container with all the right python dependencies:
docker build -t alphafold3 -f docker/Dockerfile .
You can now run AlphaFold 3!
docker run -it \
--volume $HOME/af_input:/root/af_input \
--volume $HOME/af_output:/root/af_output \
--volume <MODEL_PARAMETERS_DIR>:/root/models \
--volume <DATABASES_DIR>:/root/public_databases \
--gpus all \
alphafold3 \
python run_alphafold.py \
--json_path=/root/af_input/fold_input.json \
--model_dir=/root/models \
--output_dir=/root/af_output
📒 Note: In the example above the databases have been placed on the persistent disk, which is slow. If you want better genetic and template search performance, make sure all databases are placed on a local SSD.
If you get an error like the following, make sure the models and data are in the
paths (flags named --volume
above) in the correct locations.
docker: Error response from daemon: error while creating mount source path '/srv/alphafold3_data/models': mkdir /srv/alphafold3_data/models: permission denied.
You may prefer to run AlphaFold 3 within Singularity. You'll still need to build the Singularity image from the Docker container. Afterwards, you will not have to depend on Docker (at structure prediction time).
Official Singularity instructions are here. The commands we ran are:
wget https://github.com/sylabs/singularity/releases/download/v4.2.1/singularity-ce_4.2.1-jammy_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg --install singularity-ce_4.2.1-jammy_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f
After building the Docker container above with docker build -t
, start a
local Docker registry and upload your image alphafold3
to it. Singularity's
instructions are here.
The commands we ran are:
docker run -d -p 5000:5000 --restart=always --name registry registry:2
docker tag alphafold3 localhost:5000/alphafold3
docker push localhost:5000/alphafold3
Then build the Singularity container:
SINGULARITY_NOHTTPS=1 singularity build alphafold3.simg docker://localhost:5000/alphafold3:latest
You can confirm your build by starting a shell and inspecting the environment. For example, you may want to ensure the Singularity image can access your GPU. You may want to restart your computer if you have issues with this.
singularity exec --nv alphafold3.simg sh -c 'nvidia-smi'
You can now run AlphaFold 3!
singularity exec --nv alphafold3.simg <<args>>
For example:
singularity exec \
--nv alphafold3.simg \
--bind $HOME/af_input:/root/af_input \
--bind $HOME/af_output:/root/af_output \
--bind <MODEL_PARAMETERS_DIR>:/root/models \
--bind <DATABASES_DIR>:/root/public_databases \
python alphafold3/run_alphafold.py \
--json_path=/root/af_input/fold_input.json \
--model_dir=/root/models \
--db_dir=/root/public_databases \
--output_dir=/root/af_output