In the vncviewer session, what is DISPLAY set to? I guess it will be something like head.mydomain.com:1 and you can run x applications that done need much resource. Then I'd you run something like: srun --var=DISPLAY xterm Or sbatch with this script: #!/bin/bash xterm
You should get an xterm in a batch session. head mydomain.com must be network accessible from the compute nodes. Gareth Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/ghei36> ________________________________ From: slurm-users <slurm-users-boun...@lists.schedmd.com> on behalf of Mahmood Naderan <mahmood...@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, November 23, 2018 6:34:42 PM To: Slurm User Community List Subject: Re: [slurm-users] About x11 support Hi Gareth, Thanks for the info. My cluster is not a big one and I have configured in the following way. 1- A frontend which has the rocks 7 (based on centos 7) with gnome. Users login to this node *only* via vncviewer. 2- While a user is connected to his gnome desktop, he opens a terminal and may run an interactive GUI job. So, he has to use x11. Now, the question is, why the following error happens when we now that x11 support had been enabled during the compilation. [mahmood@rocks7 ~]$ srun --x11 --nodelist=compute-0-5 -n 1 -c 6 --mem=8G -A y8 -p RUBY xclock srun: error: Cannot forward to local display. Can only use X11 forwarding with network displays. Regards, Mahmood On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 3:22 AM Williams, Gareth (IM&T, Clayton) <gareth.willi...@csiro.au> wrote: X11 comes up on this list now and then. I'm often tempted to describe our site's approach and will do so now it case it help others (or someone wants to say why it is a terrible approach). First some preamble: * we offer 'login' nodes with limits on what can be run as a highest-reliability option for managing batch jobs * we offer a set of 'interactive' nodes where there is more flexibility for running larger analysis, development and house-keeping tasks. * we offer a set of 'visualisation' nodes with gpus and setup for hardware accelerated graphics * we encourage use of (vnc) virtual desktop sessions, and/or ssh access In both modes of access we ensure DISPLAY is set in a form that is network accessible within the cluster. ie _not_ localhost:NN With ssh this is done with the sshd_config X11UseLocalHost=no option. With DISPLAY set to a network accessible form and an xauth entry in the home directory, batch processes can access DISPLAY as long as the DISPLAY variable is passed into the job. No plugin, no compiled in support in slurm. Note that DISPLAY is not in a form immediately accessible outside the cluster (not fqdn of the external interface) and we have various firewalls in place. Gareth