[OOD-users] VDI

[Nicklas, Jeremy]

Glad to hear you were able to get a VDI working. I want to caution about using a Singularity image for the Desktop environment. We treat the VDI analogous to a "login node" for a given cluster. It is a shared node that *should* have the same environment as the batch compute nodes on the corresponding cluster.

That means a user can fire up a terminal in the Mate desktop and load modules and compile software that can run on the compute nodes. If it is run in a Singularity image the user won't have access to the system-installed modules and the same libraries (in particular glibc) when compiling software. One *untested* workaround is to modify the "mate-terminal" configuration (if using Mate) in the Desktop to SSH to a login node on startup (or SSH back to the localhost) to break out of the container.

As an aside, you can run TurboVNC and websockify in containers as they are forked off separately from the user's runtime environment.

Another aside, I have been updating the OnDemand Desktop app with the Xfce desktop and while doing that I also included code to have it disable a lot of the cruft you mentioned (e.g., PulseAudio) for both Mate and Xfce. I hope to have it included in the OOD 1.3 release. Although, you can take a peek at the latest script I use to start Mate here:

https://github.com/OSC/bc_desktop/blob/master/template/desktops/mate.sh

and feel free to use any of it in your app.

--
Jeremy Nicklas
Web and Interface App Engineer
Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC)<https://osc.edu/>
A member of the Ohio Technology Consortium<https://oh-tech.org/>
1224 Kinnear Road, Columbus, Ohio 43212
Office: (614) 292-6739<tel:+16142926739> • Mobile: (614) 316-6428<tel:+16143166428> • Fax: (614) 292-7168<tel:+16142927168>
jnicklas at osc.edu<mailto:jnicklas at osc.edu>

Learn more about OSC at https://osc.edu<https://osc.edu/>
________________________________
From: OOD-users [ood-users-bounces at lists.osc.edu] on behalf of Shawn Doughty [shawn.doughty at tufts.edu]
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2018 5:44 PM
To: User support mailing list for Open OnDemand
Subject: Re: [OOD-users] VDI

I got VDI working this last week and will see what users think. Most of the effort went into setting up CentOS 7 (our cluster is RHEL 6) with MATE in a singularity container so it didn't "pollute" the software stack on the compute nodes. Either way, the next step is to figure out how to do a minimal setup that has all the packages I want but not all the cruft the comes along with a standard installation such as PulseAudio. I spent a few minutes trying to get Ubuntu to work and gave up, will try again with the new release.

How did OSC or others deal with the issue of creating a VDI installation for OOD?

--
Shawn G. Doughty

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Susan Litzinger <susan at psc.edu<mailto:susan at psc.edu>> wrote:
One of our staff noticed that you have Virtual Desktop Interface available through Open OnDemand.  Is this released yet?  How much effort to get it installed locally?

Thanks --

Susan Litzinger
PSC




--
Shawn G. Doughty
Senior Research Technology Specialist, Research Technology
Tufts Technology Services (TTS)
16 Dearborn Road
Somerville, MA 02144
617-627-5462
http://it.tufts.edu/<https://exchange.tufts.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=I4ijzFrF9U-qoUscfQAAw3PH17xA188ItQ-l2VPx05symHhOFT2FNSr8FiNXjMnyEtzrTlLLj-Q.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fit.tufts.edu%2f>
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