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OpenGL-over-VNC-ready GPU cloud instances

4 points by brobdingnagian ↗ HN
I'm looking for a cloud provider that has GPU instances that support OpenGL apps out of the box, preferably on Ubuntu.

EC2 has GPU instances, but massive configuration is required to allow an app to see OpenGL.

I found one project that will allow you to do this with CentOS. As you can see, the steps required are substantial. https://github.com/rncry/gpu-desktop

This seems like a service some cloud provider somewhere might be offering, but thus far I haven't found what I'm looking for. Anyone know of something?

2 comments

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frozenport
Well, doing it over VNC is the Wrong Way™

Consider that texture sampling is optimized for a specific resolution, but how do you get that through a VNC window which can be scaled to any size by the host?

The right way is to render to a texture and grab the frame. See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/build-3d-streaming-applicat...

brobdingnagian
The end of that page says "You should use a product based on the Remote Framebuffer Protocol (RFB), such as a member of the VNC family."

I'm personally using a Chromebook, and there is a VNC app that works well. The problem is, how do I even get my scientific OpenGL app using OpenGL on the instance in the first place. The GPU isn't even seen by OpenGL apps by default. I could spend days trying to iron out a process, but I'm really surprised that no one is offering this out of the box.