Nicholas, At CU-Boulder we use NICE. It has a Tomcat interface (on a smallish VM) for users to authenticate and request a viz session. It then dispatches a Slurm job to one of our GPU-enabled nodes, which returns what is basically a souped-up VNC desktop directly to the user. We require users to have a NICE client on their local desktop.
It took a little bit of scripting to get everything working just how we wanted it, and I'd say that NICE is a little less flexible that I might wish for in a perfect world, but overall the system is super-smooth. One especially nice feature is that as long as the Slurm job is running, the desktop stays available to be connected to, thus a user can start working in in a computer lab and then go home to finish the assignment on her laptop or whatever. NICE also supports session sharing, which is good for teaching and teams, though this does have some security implications such as giving sharees access to all of the sharer's directories (including things like the .ssh directory...) Our compute nodes are on a private network so we have a NAT connection to the viz nodes. NICE supports this setup. You might also look at FastX, though I have much less direct experience with that. (It is dramatically cheaper.) Pete Ruprecht CU-Boulder Research Computing On 8/17/16, 8:33 AM, "Nicholas McCollum" <[email protected]> wrote: >Hello All, > >I've been looking for remote visualization solutions that integrate with >slurm; While I have found several companies that say they could work with >slurm, I have yet to find any that can actually show me a product. > >Essentially I am wanting a solution where a class of 40 students could >log >on to our supercomputers, be provided a remote CentOS VM desktop that is >attached to a GPU so that they can either interactively send jobs to the >GPU that they are assigned or run programs like Spartan, Maestro, Abacus, >ANSYS, etc. > >If anyone has a working remote visualization cluster that integrates well >with slurm, I would love to hear from you. > >Thanks! > >------------------- >Nicholas McCollum >HPC Systems Administrator >Alabama Supercomputer Authority
