[VirtualGL-Users] Announcing VizStack

[Kumar, S. <shr...@hp...>]

I am pleased to announce that a new release of VizStack (http://vizstack.sourceforge.net/) 
is now available. VizStack can be installed on GPU clusters running Linux. Each node can 
have 1 or more GPUs; only nVidia GPUs work are supported for now.

This has some features that I believe will be useful to users on this list; I've seen
email on this list that asks about setup needed for VirtualGL. VizStack can 
help in the following ways:

  1. You can start TurboVNC/VirtualGL sessions on a GPU cluster using either
      - a GUI that is installed on your desktop
      - a command line script (viz-tvnc)

    Inside the TurboVNC session, you just use "vglrun" to run your apps; 
    everything else is setup for you automatically. VizStack takes care of
    allocating GPUs to users, configuring and starting X servers, etc.

  2. Each GPU can be shared with 2 or more users. The number of users a GPU
     can be shared with is configurable per GPU. In this case, the "vglrun"
     for users sharing a GPU is redirected to the X server configured with
     the shared GPU. 

  3. Another script (viz-vgl) is available. This uses the VirtualGL Image
     Transport. Basically, you run the VirtualGL client on your desktop, SSH
     to the cluster, run viz-vgl <app>, and the application pops up on your
     desktop. Stereo is supported with viz-vgl, but GPUs cannot be shared
     currently in this scenario.

Also,

  4. If you are a ParaView user OR Avizo user, you can run these applications
     either directly (from the command line), or from the TurboVNC/VirtualGL 
     session.

VizStack works on a single node too, not just a cluster. It should install on
all Linux distributions; we provide packages for 64 bit RPMs for RHEL5, 
SLES11/10, and Ubuntu 9.10. As an example use case, if you have a two GPU 
machine, you could quickly use VizStack to allow 2/4/more remote users using
TurboVNC/VirtualGL.

NOTE: If you use VizStack, you may notice that it starts X servers dynamically,
and not all of them on :0 :-)

If you run into issues, please feel free to contact me/send email to the VizStack 
user's mailing list(subscription needed).

I am also looking forward to any feedback you may have w.r.t how we setup things.

Cheers
-- Shree