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1: Select the H5AD file you want to visualize

First, navigate to the H5AD file that you want to visualize. If this is your first time on Latch, you will find an example H5AD file under the folder welcome/scbrowser/scanpy-pbmc3k.h5ad

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2: Start a new CELLxGENE Pod session

1

When you open CELLxGENE on the file for the first time, a new Latch Pod will be created.

Latch Pod is a cloud-based computer that can scale up to 96 CPUs and 2TB of RAM, making it ideal for hosting interactive visualizations such as CELLxGENE, RShiny, Dash App, Jupyter Notebook, or RStudio.For compute-intensive visualization of large single-cell datasets with over 1 million cells, the customizable Latch Pod is powerful, as you can increase the RAM as needed to accommodate growing datasets.
2

Once you click 'Create', you will see a status that indicates a Latch Pod is Launching.

Please note that for H5AD files greater than 10GB, it may take up to 5-10 minutes to launch the Pod.
3

Start Visualizing!

The CellXGene pod will open automatically.

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(Optional) 3: Change the compute resources for CELLxGENE

Sometimes, it’s often desirable for single-cell applications to increase the computer’s RAM for compute-intensive steps, such as computing TSNE and PCA, or running differential expression analyses. Because CELLxGENE is directly hosted on a Latch Pod that you have direct access to, changing the underlying resource profile is easy.
1

Navigate to Latch Pods

First, navigate to the Latch Pods tab. It should be fourth tab on the left navigation sidebar. You should see the CELLxGENE pod that you just opened.
2

Open the Pod Manager

Click on Manage Pod.
3

Modify Compute

Scroll down to the Compute & Storage section, modify the cores and RAM, and click Update.It will take a few seconds for your Pod to scale up.
Don’t worry, all the dependencies and files are fully preserved inside the Pod during the scaling process.
4

View the Updatted Resources

Once the Pod finishes scaling up, you can verify the new resource profile on the sidebar.

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(Optional) 4: Turn off the Pod to save costs

Once you finish your analysis, you can go to the Pod and click the Stop button to shut down the Pod.

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Frequently Asked Questions