Advanced Resource Manager Configurations

This page details advanced settings for any resource manager that could be helpful in using Open OnDemand.

Visualization Nodes

At OSC we offer visualization nodes that attach the X11 session to a GPU so that any rendering can occur on the GPU itself.

We’ve defined vis as a Slurm GRES that jobs can request (i.e., some batch connect applications request this Slurm GRES).

We use a Slurm prolog to do the actual work of attaching the X11 session to the GPU.

Other resource managers may have a similar facility for doing work just before the job starts running.

This is an example of that Slurm prolog.

if [[ "$SLURM_LOCALID" == "0" && "$SLURM_JOB_GRES" == *"vis"* ]]; then
  if [ -n "$CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES" ]; then
    FIRSTGPU=$(echo $CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES | tr ',' "\n" | head -1)
    setsid /usr/bin/X :${FIRSTGPU} -noreset >& /dev/null &
    sleep 2
    if [ -n "$DISPLAY" ]; then
      echo "export OLDDISPLAY=$DISPLAY"
    fi
    echo "export DISPLAY=:$FIRSTGPU"
  fi
fi