My research lab recently added a server that has a beefy NVIDIA graphics card, which we would like to use to do scientific computations. Since it isn't a workstation, we'll have to run our jobs remotely, over an ssh connection. Most of our applications require doing opengl rendering to an offscreen buffer, then doing image analysis on the result in CUDA.

My initial investigation suggests that X11 forwarding is a bad idea, because opengl rendering will occur on the client machine (or rather the X11 server--what a confusing naming convention!) and will suffer network bottlenecks when sending our massive textures. We will never need to display the output, so it seems like X11 forwarding shouldn't be necessary, but Opengl needs the $DISPLAY to be set to something valid or our applications won't run. I'm sure render farms exist that do this, but how is it accomplished? I think this is probably a simple X11 configuration issue, but I'm too unfamiliar with it to know where to start.

We're running Ubuntu server 10.04, with no gdm, gnome, etc installed. However, xserver-xorg package is installed.