[OpendTect_Developers] Remote 3D rendering/ Use of the GPU

[Jb West]

Julien,
  Remote OpenGL over-the-wire is doomed to not work. Have a look at VirtualGL and the TurboVNC project. I've found this to be the best free remote-opengl solution. http://www.virtualgl.org/

JB West
jbwest at luminterra.com
________________________________________
From: developers-bounces at opendtect.org [developers-bounces at opendtect.org] On Behalf Of Julien Moreau [julien.moreau at geo.ku.dk]
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:57 AM
To: developers at opendtect.org
Subject: [OpendTect_Developers] Remote 3D rendering/ Use of the GPU

Hello OdT Community,

I am a new to this list and I am not sure it is the right place to ask the question. However, I assume that you are probably the ones which are most likely to try this kind of operation.

For obvious economic reason and practicality I want to run OpendTect remotely on my workstation or in the future maybe a Cuda system or a server with Tesla cards. I work with OdT everyday but I want also to teach in class and convincing my Uni  to buy 20 quadro cards is not easy (So far I have 10 which is good).

I have performed several tests and from an old Dell laptop with a Quadro and Ubuntu installed I can connect on my workstation and it works perfectly fine through SSH.

Then I tried from a windows 8 laptop with a regular mobile NVidia + the intel chipset. Using Putty and Xming. I can do everything I want except indirect rendering. I spent some time reading about the error code (Xlib is missing the extension NV-GLX). And apparently it is due to the difference in architecture between the systems. There are compatibility flags and if the X server is not happy then you switch from indirect rendering to direct rendering (which is catastrophic over the network indeed). Then I went to see how to update my server in case it would perform better. And I discovered the numerous flavours of mesa and I must admit I don't know what to choose (I have by default installed mesa-dri).
Here a link to the description of the problem
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/remote-3d-is-it-possible-839699/
I have also noticed the presence of a od_glxinfo program which might be some of the solution.

My investigation might seems confused and I would be please to have your advices on that. Particularly if you found a turnaround (knowing that I am not a huge fan of remote control of the machine through vnc).

Thank you in advance,

Julien