Hello ThinLinc community,
I wanted to share this interesting article from Jonas Lindemann and Anders Follin at LUNARC, Lund University, detailing their experience in building an interactive HPC environment using ThinLinc.
The article, titled “Interactive HPC and the LUNARC Desktop Environment,” provides a fascinating look at their journey since 2011, starting with different architectures and leading to their current setup based on Cendio’s ThinLinc combined with their custom backend framework, GfxLauncher.
The authors discuss:
• The initial challenges of providing user-friendly access to HPC resources beyond SSH .
• Their early experiences with a Teradici-based PCoIP solution and its limitations.
• The exploration of software-based remote desktop solutions like NoMachine and VNC and the reasons for ultimately choosing ThinLinc.
• The development of their GfxLauncher framework to support hardware-accelerated graphics and Jupyter Notebooks submitted to the backend cluster.
• The architecture of their current LUNARC HPC Desktop, leveraging SLURM for resource management.
• The user interface and experience designed around making HPC interactive and accessible.
• Insights into performance and scalability.
• Usage statistics highlighting the popularity of applications like MATLAB, R-Studio, ParaView, and ABAQUS.
• Future work and challenges in further developing their interactive HPC environment.
This article provides valuable insights into how ThinLinc can be effectively used in a demanding HPC context and the innovative solutions developed by the LUNARC team.
It’s a great read for anyone interested in interactive HPC, remote desktops, and the integration of these technologies with resource management systems.
I hope you find it informative!
Abstract:
Since 2011, LUNARC has aimed to provide an interactive HPC environment for its resource users. Several different architectures have been used, but since 2013, we have been using a remote desktop environment based on Cendio’s ThinLinc [1] combined with a custom backend framework, GfxLauncher [2], supporting hardware-accelerated graphics applications and Jupyter Notebooks [3] submitted to the backend cluster.
Links to the article:
Interactive HPC and the LUNARC Desktop Environment
Authors Tags: