OOD Changes - August 2024

OOD changes

We have modified the behaviour of the interactive desktop/MATLAB etc sessions on the cluster based on the last few months of experience with the system. The changes are to ensure fairer share of the resources and to avoid sessions being requested that cannot be fulfilled by OOD. 

All interactive sessions have new launcher pages that default to our recommended ‘normal’ settings for memory and CPU. Unless you have a very specific reason to request more, we would like you to stick with this setting. If you do need more RAM or CPUs then there is an advanced option which allows you to specify these. Please note, the more you ask for the longer the wait for the session is likely to be. We are also now limiting the total memory that these large sessions can occupy to try to always be able to provide desktops to those that are OK with the standard session.

You may now specify fractions of a day for session duration, so if you only need it for a couple of hours you can request 0.1 days, etc.

The GPU selection is now a drop-down, and changes made here will influence other settings, e.g. session duration/GPU quantity as required by our cluster settings.

We no longer allow the requesting of more than two of the desktop, MATLAB, Jupyter or RStudio sessions – you will see an error message if you try to submit a third session. Please do not run more than one desktop session, but it is fine to run a desktop and one of the other types.

Finally, an issue with memory over-request by the Desktop session launcher and fsl_sub (when RAM details were provided) has been identified and fixed.