This repo contains a working configuration to run a remote desktop in an apptainer configuration in Open OnDemand in the HUIT OOD environment. It requires a spack environment to use apptainer commands, and also requires a built container that exists in a location accessible to compute nodes. In this case that's a shared EFS volume.
This app is configured to run on desktop nodes configured by Parallel Cluster, assumed to be in a queue called desktop. This will ensure that VNC is available for the remote desktop connection.
The spack environment is articulated in spack-environment/apptainer/spack.yml. The environment can be created with a command like spack env create apptainer ./spack-environment/apptainer/spack.yml from the root of this repo. The run script at template/script.sh.erb will activate the spack installation at /shared/spack and then the environment called apptainer in order to run the container.
The definition for the apptainer container is at build/xfce.def. It can be invoked after the apptainer module is loaded with apptainer build /shared/apptainerImages/xfce.sif ./build/xfce.def from the root of this repo. This is a native apptainer image build based on an Ubuntu docker image.