Access local gpu when ssh into remote server

Question

I'm trying to run a very graphically unintensive program on a remote server. However, it has no GPU capability, and thus the program just returns an X Window System error. The program runs fine on my local machine - is there a way to ssh into the remote server, but still have access to my local resources, so I can, in a sense, submit jobs to my local machine to complete?

edit: I'm already using ssh -Y to log into the server, and other graphical programs (gnuplot) do work properly.

Thanks for any assistance.

Answer 1

X Windows System error usually means that you're trying to run a graphical program through command line which does not have a screen connected to it.

There's two ways to circumvent this. Either the program has a way to run headless (without displaying graphics) or you need to create some kind of graphics capability.

There's options like using VNC or running through X forwarded SSH. To do the latter, just do ssh with an -X flag.

(e.g. ssh -X root@myhost)

Or you could just redirect all the graphics to the monitor the computer is connected to, by doing this as the very first thing:

export DISPLAY=:0.0