Using 3D hardware acceleration in Renku VNC

RenkuLab
1

Hi,

Is 3D hardware acceleration supported in Renku VNC?

Is so, is there a way to enable it?

Thanks,
Richard.

2

Hi Richard,

Which deployment of Renku are you using? Is it renkulab.io?

Gavin

3

I think for this you would also need access to a GPU right?

4

Hi Gavin,

We are using FROM renku/renkulab-vnc:0.11.0

5

I am trying to run mbeditviz in Renku VNC.

I get this error message from the application in the terminal: “Error: mbGLwMDrawingArea: request visual not supported”

The libglu1-mesa-dev is already installed, so does anyone have some insight into what else must be installed to enable visual support for this program.

6

Are you on renkulab.io or another deployment? i.e. Does your renku session start with renkulab.io?

7

Yes, renkulab.io - please see image below

Renku session is started by click on the VNC icon on the Jupyter Lab launcher

image
image1749×1014 169 KB

8

Renkulab.io does not provide any hardware acceleration (GPUs) unfortunately. I’m not too familiar with libglu1-mesa-dev to see if I could help. Are you able to run mbeditviz locally on your machine?

9

Hi Gavin,

When running Renku VNC locally on a PC I get the same result using mbeditviz.

The application is likely trying to use openGL which won’t work on a virual machine as it needs to access the hardware.

Some kind of virtual openGL driver would likely be required if it exists.

10

Hi Richard,

I think this is a limitation with the public deployment (not having GPUs). We are trying to work out ways to allow users to access GPUs ‘per session’ in the future but right now it is not possible.

Apologies!
Gavin