Cluster Support for Genetic Programming

I talked to Josiah earlier today and got him to install Xvfb (X Virtual FrameBuffer) on the cluster; so now you can run Processing and other graphical applications on there. Xvfb emulates a graphical display, so as far as your programs are concerned they’re running in a full fledged graphical environment. All you have to do is launch your application with my “headless” script. Headless simply creates a virtual display with Xvfb, and tells your program to use it instead of the default display.

To use headless:
Download the script and copy it to your home directory on the cluster:

scp -p -r headless YourUserName@fly.hampshire.edu:~/

Now say your graphical program is called doawesome and takes three arguments. Instead of telling tractor or multiquery to issue the command:
./doawesome 1 33 7
You tell it to use the headless script instead:
./headless ./doawesome 1 33 7

One more tip for processing users:
When you’re ready to run your sketch on the cluster, open it in processing and click File->Export application, then select Linux and hit export. This should create a directory called application.linux inside your sketch’s directory, and within application.linux a shell script that will launch your sketch. To run it on the cluster just copy this application.linux directory to your home directory:

scp -p -r YourSketch/application.linux YourUserName@fly.hampshire.edu:~/

And issue jobs for the headless script to launch the shell script inside of ~/application.linux

multiquery './headless ~/application.linux/doawesome'

This entry was posted on October 17, 2009 at 11:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized.