our users work by default on Windows PCs and are using many codes for pre/post treatments.
we want to integrate physically these components beside the HPC and integrate them into OOD. so, no more data transfer and data management.
I already tested Windows PC plus TightVNC server within noVNC. for 2D applications, it works. it’s could be a solution. a plus is that TightVNC has a service which allows to open a windows session.
the question is : how to do this integration into OOD ?
for 3D, i’m thinking of XPRA over noVNC. i’ll see this point later
Your ideas are welcomed.
note : we have tested the Nice DCV solution. great, but expensive !
Besides moving the pre/post work to virtual desktops running on Windows servers, if users have access to pre/post on their own computers and the only problem you are trying to address is the data management/transfer problem, another approach would be to use https://www.globus.org/ for managing file transfer. I’m exploring that integration right now with OnDemand, but the idea would be the “solve with Fluent on HPC” step would be optimized by providing access to a list of input files from a globus end point, which would be a directory mounted on the user’s computer.
I’m happy to share more once I have a working example.
I have realized a demo on how to integrate a Windows farm of VMs into OOD
each Windows 10 VM has :
– sshd service
– nfs client for HPC data access
– ldap client (pgina) for authentication
– a Tightvnc server
on OOD server :
– a noVNC-1.1.0 server with a token list associated to rhe windows nodes
– a simple booking service based upon ssh for query windows sessions
– an OOD application generating a dynamic page to choose free windows node or reconnect to previous allocated node
– a link inside this dynamic page launches a noVNC client to connect on the choosen node
– a proxy rule for the noVNC traffic