Running RStudio Desktop in a Singularity container on the University of Sheffield's ShARC cluster

Work in progress

Building a Singularity container with R, RStudio and VirtualGL

From a machine with user namespaces enabled (typically not the case on HPC):

singularity build --fakeroot rstudio-desktop.simg rstudio-desktop.def

(or if user namespaces are disabled omit --fakeroot and prefix the line with sudo)

Running with hardware-accelerated graphics

1. Copy the built image to HPC

2. Start a hardware-accelerated visualisation session on a worker node

3. Connect to that via TigerVNC

4. Run on the node via TigerVNC shell:

   singularity exec --nv rstudio-desktop.simg vglrun rstudio

Running without hardware-accelerated graphics

1. Copy the built image to HPC

2. SSH to HPC with X forwarding enabled

3. Start an interactive session on a worker node with X forwarding enabled

4. Tell RStudio not to try using hardware-accelerated graphics by adding the following to $HOME/.config/RStudio/desktop.ini beneath a [General] heading:

   desktop.renderingEngine=software
   general.disableGpuDriverBugWorkarounds=false
   general.ignoreGpuBlacklist=false

5. Run on that node:

   singularity exec rstudio-desktop.simg rstudio