VNC: Difference between revisions

Graham has two dedicated VDI nodes collectively known as gra-vdi.  These nodes provide a remote desktop environment equipped with accelerated OpenGL.  The machine is ideal for the most demanding and complex interactive graphical tasks.  The VDI nodes share Graham's <code>/home, /project,</code> and <code>/scratch</code> filesystems.  As a result, any data files or directories created on graham by running jobs in the queue will immediately be accessible on gra-vdi for visualization and post-processing purposes without the need to transfer them over.

Users can also connect directly to either machine by specifying <code>VNC server: '''gra-vdi3.sharcnet.ca'''</code> or enter <code>VNC server: '''gra-vdi4.sharcnet.ca'''</code>.  This may be useful if you find one machine is overloaded (oversubscribed) and thus not very responsive.  Or if you consistently want to use the local $SCRATCH directory (defined as /local/tmp/$USER) on one server but not the other.  Its also worth pointing out at this time that $SCRATCH is defined differently on the clusters (as /scratch/$USER) where it is shared by all nodes.  Similar to the clusters however, any data left on $SCRATCH on gra-vdi will eventually be deleted since the disc space is limited.  Thus please do not plan on storing any files on $SCRATCH for more than 60days!

Lastly, please keep in mind the VDI nodes are provided as a shared visualization resource.  If you need to perform long running computational tasks within an application gui, then please logout of gra-vdi and instead connect to a compute node on any cluster as described in the <b>Compute Nodes</b> section below.  This will ensure the memory and CPU resources on gra-vdi remain fully available for other users to conduct their own simultaneous graphical work without any noticeable performance impacts.