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

Copy the built image to HPC
Start a hardware-accelerated visualisation session on a worker node
Connect to that via TigerVNC

Run on the node via TigerVNC shell:

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

Running without hardware-accelerated graphics

Copy the built image to HPC
SSH to HPC with X forwarding enabled
Start an interactive session on a worker node with X forwarding enabled
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
```

Run on that node:

singularity exec rstudio-desktop.simg rstudio