New Hardware-Accelerated Visualization Partition

1/17/2024

By Stephanie Dascola


We are excited to introduce a brand-new feature of Great Lakes to researchers who need hardware acceleration for their visualization requirements. ARC has created a specialized “viz” partition, consisting of four nodes equipped with NVIDIA P40 GPUs. These nodes are accessible through Open OnDemand’s Remote Desktop functionality.

Key details about this new feature:

  • Jobs utilizing the viz partition have a maximum walltime of 2 hours.
  • The charge rate for the viz partition is currently aligned with our standard partition. 

To make use of the viz partition, follow these steps:

  • Create a Remote Desktop job on Great Lakes via Open OnDemand.
  • Request the “viz” partition, specifying 1 node and 1 GPU (Please note that we have only one GPU available per node).
  • Prefix any application you intend to run with accelerated graphics with the command “vglrun.” (example: “vglrun glxgears”)

An image of data visualization created using a non-gpu software accelerated application.

An image of data visualization created using a gpu hardware accelerated application. Using gpu hardware acceleration, researchers may see up to a 10x performance improvement.

For questions or support requests, please contact our team at [email protected].