One year of Educloud OnDemand, and update notes
It's been roughly a year since the first "pilot" users were allowed onto Educloud OnDemand, and we're very happy to see that it has been so well recieved.
Enabling HPC for both new uses and new users fits right into the core of the UiO IT department's mission, and while we are happy with what we have done so far - we are not done.
We have been working behind the scenes to improve our setup and get ready for another year, and while most of this should be invisible to users we believe this will make the service better and more powerful than ever.
A short summary of changes follows:
Improvements:
- Multiple backend improvements to workflow, configuration management, app development, etc
- GPU direct rendering support for desktop applications such as Matlab, Paraview and 3D Slicer
- Ability to choose between different GPU types
- Built-in file browser now lets you access all* project areas
- Improved support for project-specific apps, for example to let courses use reservations
- VNC sessions will no longer time out after short periods of inactivity
Apps:
- New Fox Desktop app with VirtualGL/DRI support
- Added Fiji (Improved ImageJ) app
- Matlab, Paraview, Slicer will now automatically use hardware acceleration if selected
Coming soon?:
- New Jupyter app with support for custom installations to ease dependency handling
- Updated and improved RStudio image
- Push notifications on your phone when a queued interactive job is about to start
Known issues/limitations:
- Members of many (>12) projects will not see all project storage areas in the file browser. Fix is on the way.
- RStudio does not play well with lmod/easybuild R
- Browser cookies/cache can occasionally get corrupted and need to be cleared out by the user to log in
- Documentation is somewhat incomple
As always: please do get in touch if you have questions, praise, criticism, suggestions, ideas or anything else. Your feedback is vital to improve the service!
We hope you will enjoy our new and improved OnDemand service!
On behalf of the Educloud and Fox team: Happy computing!
Andreas Skau,
Research Computing Services, UiO IT dept.