Running a GUI application inside a container on a headless (without display) cluster

Question

It's been quite a while that I am struggling to solve an issue but no success. I would like to run Carla simulator 9.10.1 in their provided docker container on a headless (without display) cluster which is managed by Slurm. We use enroot containers on our cluster. So, we convert docker images to enroot sqsh files first, and then we run it. Carla runs flawlessly when a display is connected with or without a container on my PC. However, when it comes to running it on a headless cluster, non of the official Carla methods for running it on a headless cluster worked for me because I am only able to run my experiments inside an enroot container with Slurm (not on the head node) on a headless cluster. So, there are some permission restrictions for my user as well on the cluster. I have to mention that I only need to run Carla and I don't want to see the GUI but the problem is Carla doesn't start off-screen or without rendering. The app quits without any error when I also run it with Off-screen or no-rendering flags . So, I was wondering

• if it is possible at all to run a GUI app inside a container on a headless cluster?
• I have tried creating a virtual display but when I'd like to run Xorg:7 , I get (EE) parse_vt_settings: Cannot open /dev/tty0 (Permission denied) . I have also set allowed_users=console to /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config file but it didn't help. Is there any other way to create a virtual display?
• I have not tried xvbf because Carla needs OpenGL and people say it may not be easy to make it work.

Is there any way to get this working? Thanks.

Answer 1

you can try virtualgl but it only works if you don't need to see the display itself.

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualgl/files/3.0.1/virtualgl_3.0.1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i virtualgl_3.0.1_amd64.deb
apt-get update 
apt-get -f install

after installing you can use vglrun glxgears

where glxgears is your application.