JUSTUS2/Visualization
TigerVNC
TigerVNC is a high-performance implementation of VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a client/server application that allows users to launch and interact with graphical applications on remote machines. It should be faster than standard X11 forwarding and thus can be used if a graphical software feels slow and has bad responsiveness.
Instructions
First, you need to start the VNC server on the bwunicluster. Therefore you must log into the bwunicluster with your username and password as usual. You should not start the server on a login node but request an interactive job using for example the following command.
$ msub -v HOME,TERM,USER,DISPLAY -S /bin/bash -I -l nodes=1:ppn=1 -l walltime=0:02:00:00
On your assigned compute node start the VNC server with
$ module load vis/tigervnc $ run_vncserver
The script prints detailed instructions on how to establish the connection to the VNC server with your computer. They depend on whether you use Windows or Linux and if you work with ssvnc which is a tool that can simplify the process a little bit. Therefore the next steps are divided into 3 cases. Each command should be issued on the local computer.
Login with ssvnc Needed Software ssvnc http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/ssvnc.html
Open ssvnc and fill in the parameters provided by the run_vncserver script. Check "Use SSH" and click on the "Connect" button.
Login without ssvnc for Linux users
Needed Software A VNC viewer such as tigervnc, gvncviewer or tightvnc
A tunnel must be created with the command given by the run_vncserver script. Open a new terminal, start a VNC viewer and connect to localhost:1 using a command such like this
$ vncviewer localhost:1
Login without ssvnc for Windows users Needed Software tigervnc http://sourceforge.net/projects/tigervnc/files/tigervnc/1.3.0/tigervnc-1.3.0.exe/download Putty http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
You need to start Putty and add a tunnel in Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels with the parameters provided by run_vncserver. Now you can start tigervnc and connect to localhost:1
Shutdown
If you want to exit your VNC session don't just close the window because then the VNC server won't terminate and you will run into problems when you try to start a new VNC session later. If you log out of Gnome properly the VNC server will terminate automatically.