Warning
Iceberg reaches end-of-life on 30th November 2020. If you are running jobs on Iceberg then you need to take urgent action to ensure that your jobs/scripts will run on ShARC or Bessemer. If you have never used ShARC or Bessemer then now is the time to test your scripts. Not all software on Iceberg is available on ShARC/Bessemer.
Software that requires OpenGL and a graphics card to render complex visualisations cannot be run on all of Iceberg’s nodes as:
Only a limited number of nodes have graphics cards
None of the nodes that do have a monitor attached
To run such software on Iceberg we therefore need:
A means to automate the finding of a node with a graphics card that we can use for visualisation purposes
A way of streaming the images rendered on a node through to the machine the user is sat in front of.
We have set up on Iceberg a system for hardware-accelerated visualisation that uses two main tools: VirtualGL and TigerVNC. See below for simple usage instructions.
Download and install TigerVNC on your machine. TigerVNC is a program that allows you to efficiently view graphical programs on one computer that are actually running on another computer.
Connect to Iceberg. Note that if you are using a VPN connection from off-campus then at present the following instructions will not work for you if your home network uses IP addresses in the range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.3.255: you should instead a) connect from on-campus or b) use the ShARC cluster’s visualisation nodes or c) change your home network IP range to something different e.g. 192.168.100.0-255.
On the login node (not a worker node) run the command qsh-vis. The output should look something like the following:
[te1st@iceberg-login1 ~]$ qsh-vis
NOTE: you can only run 1 GPU acclerated session
New 'node000:1 (te1st)' desktop is node000:1
Starting applications specified in /home/te1st/.vnc/xstartup
Log file is /home/te1st/.vnc/node000:1.log
Accelerated VNC graphics session started
*******To connect: *******
Either startup a web-browser and enter the address:
http://node000.sheffield.ac.uk:5800
or
use the TigerVNC application to connect to:
node000.sheffield.ac.uk:5900
Make sure to enter your normal Iceberg username/password when prompted.
To end session : press [enter]
Leave that terminal running.
On your machine start the ‘VNC Viewer’ program that comes with TigerVNC (this is called vncviewer on Linux). You should then see a dialog box like this:
Enter the connection details for TigerVNC that were issued by the qsh-vis command e.g. node000.shef.ac.uk:5901 (NB the node name and last four digits may differ when you run qsh-vis).
Click Connect
You should now see a desktop within a window. This desktop is running on a worker node (in the case of the presented example this is node000`; see the qsh-vis output) that is equipped with a graphics card (Optional: run nvidia-smi to see what type of graphics card). A terminal window is automatically started from which you can load modules and start applications that require hardware-accelerated graphics.
When you are finished, close VNC Viewer then return to the terminal within which you started qsh-vis and press enter to stop the worker session (and allow someone else to use that graphics-card-equipped node).
Sessions started using qsh-vis by default have allocated to them:
1 CPU core
1 GPU
You can request additional resources by passing the same parameters to qsh-vis that can be used with qrsh/qrshx/qsh/qsub (see Starting interactive jobs and submitting batch jobs).
Research groups who have purchased their own GPU visualisation nodes may have different defaults.
At present only one graphics-card-equipped node is available for use with qsh-vis so there may be contention for this resource. Some research groups have purchased their own visualisation nodes.
Behind the scenes:
qsh-vis sets the default resources to be requested for the interactive session (based on whether the user belongs to a research group that has dedicated visualisation nodes)…
…then uses qrsh to start a script with these resources.
This script then starts a TigerVNC vncserver on a port that is unique over the range of machines on which hardware-accelerated visualisation sessions can be started.
TigerVNC supports VirtualGL, a means of streaming the images rendered by say a graphics card to a remote machine.
The aforementioned script then kills the created Xvnc process when Enter is pressed.
