The standard operating system on the cluster is Redhat linux. However, another operating system can be run on the cluster using virtual images. For example, It is possible to run windows OS and windows based application on Griffith HPC. The following HowTo will outline the steps involved. There are some limitations which will be mentioned at the end.
Connect to the Desktop of Griffith HPC Head Node
Use strudel to connect to the desktop:
strudel - Connect to the HPC Facility using a Graphical Interface
Open a Terminal on the desktop
Submit an interactive PBS job with -X option and Queue qweek_s.
e.g: qsub -I -X -q qweek_s -l walltime=01:00:00
There would be a wait time especially if enough resouces are not available. You will get a meesage like below when the job is successfull and would be taken to the compute time for the period of the walltime.
>>>>>> qsub: job 4260247.pbsserver ready ########################### Execution Started ############################# JobId:4260247.pbsserver UserName:s1234567 GroupName:1234567 ExecutionHost:n048 WorkingDir:/var/spool/PBS/mom_priv ###############################################################################
Creating the Virtual Machine
cd /scratch/images/
The pre-installed image files are placed here:
check the vdi image file :
ls -lh *.vdi
It will show the size of the image in GB.
Make sure Windows VM is turned off, if not sure run
virtualbox
to check and power it off if necessary.
Now you can resize the image, for example if you want to increase the disk size to 80GB (81920MB), you can use VBoxManage command to do it, here the size need to be in MB :
VBoxManage modifyhd win7-hpc.vdi --resize 81920
Create a new VM using the images in /scratch/images by first copying the image to your local directory and pointing it during the creation of the VM.
e.g cp /scratch/images/win7-hpc.vdi ~/VBimage
Please note that the session should be shutdown after use. Also note that your walltime determines the time you have available to run jobs. Please plan and request resources appropriately when you submit the job with qsub. For example, memory and walltime would be one of the considerations.