XCOMPUTE-CLIENT

XCOMPUTE-CLIENT is built and distributed on recent x86-64 and arm64 architectures for Linux and Mac OS.

• Installable packages for Mac OS *.pkg and Debian/Ubuntu *.deb

• Manual install for Linux/Unix using *.tar.gz

• Native support for Windows coming soon!

This guide will help users set up their client interface to connect to project hosts.

Prerequisites

XCOMPUTE Account

To use XCOMPUTE-CLIENT, you must first Sign Up. When you download a product package, a license is generated to authenticate and encrypt your access of XCOMPUTE-CLIENT with XCOMPUTE-SERVER.

Hardware Requirements

XCOMPUTE-CLIENT makes modest use of a computer’s CPU and much more use of GPU (FP32).

Recommended CPU

For x86-64, the CPU must at minimum support the x86-64-v2 microarchtecture. Notably, features like: SSE3, SSE4_1, and SSE4_2. It does not need to support AVX, AVX2, BMI1, and BMI2 (these are part of x86-64-v3). 4+ threads are recommended but not required.

On Linux, check that the CPU microarchitecture supports instructions like SSE4_1 and SSE4_2:

grep flags /proc/cpuinfo | head -1 | grep sse4

Recommended GPU

A dedicated GPU works best, but good results have been demonstrated with integrated graphics.

• The GPU must support FP32 math and OpenGL 4.1 graphics standard, 2-16 GB RAM. Experimental OpenGL 3.1 support is provided for Linux ARM64 (embedded).

• The GPU manufacturer (Nvidia, AMD, Intel, etc) provides the drivers for OpenGL support. (Consult their docs for details.)

Recommended Network

Propagating changes between XCOMPUTE-SERVER and XCOMPUTE-CLIENT, update times are directly correlated to the upload & download speeds between connected computers.

• Most often, the throughput bottleneck is the public WAN and not the private LAN; often wireless access is sufficient.

• For high-speed on-site access, a wired gigabit connection can offer accelerated update speed.

Software Requirements

XCOMPUTE-CLIENT relies on a few commonplace libraries and frameworks.

The major ones are:

• GLIBC 2.34+, OpenSSL3 (circa 2022-now)

• Qt5 user interface framework. We install or bundle a dynamic linkable library with XCOMPUTE-CLIENT, per our LGPL-3.0 agreement with Qt. You are entitled to relink XCOMPUTE-CLIENT against another Qt5 library; if your OS requires library codesigning (e.g. Mac OS), relinking may be non-trivial.

• OpenGL 4.1 graphics library for your GPU. The OpenGL software for the GPU is typically provided by the manufacturer of the GPU, e.g., NVIDIA for its GeForce GPUs, or AMD for its Radeon GPUs. The software may be provided as a tarball or as a Debian package. Most often, OpenGL will come with your Qt installation.

Selecting a package

XCOMPUTE-CLIENT is available on the following platforms:

• Mac OS packages for m-series CPU 2020-now:

  • xcompute-client_macos14-apple.pkg

• Mac OS packages for Intel CPU 2015-2020:

  • xcompute-client_macos12-intel.pkg

• Debian packages for Ubuntu 24+ / Debian 12+ on x86_64:

  • xcompute-client_linux-u24-x86_64.deb

• Debian packages for Ubuntu 22 / Debian 11 on x86_64:

  • xcompute-client_linux-u22-x86_64.deb

• Compressed tarfiles for Linux GLIBC 2.38+ on x86_64:

  • xcompute-client_linux-u24-x86_64.tar.xz

• Compressed tarfiles for Linux GLIBC 2.34+ on x86_64:

  • xcompute-client_linux-u22-x86_64.tar.xz

The downloaded file has the full version ID in the filename. The specific OS release is denoted in the name by u22, u24, or macos14. For example, xcompute-client_25.1-0319.b0b7cd0b-u24_amd64.deb is a Debian package with version ID 25.1-0319.b0b7cd0b and built on Ubuntu 24.04.

The macOS packages, macos12 stands for macOS Monterey (version 12); macos14 for macOS Sonoma (version 14).The download filename will have m12x2 for macOS version 12 on x86-64-v2 microarchitecture, or m14a8for macOS version 14 on Apple Silicon, which uses the ARMv8 architecture (hence, a8).

In the case of Linux systems, the tarballs built for Ubuntu and Debian should work for Fedora and RHEL, given manual emplacement steps are taken after installation.

Download Package

Login to your XCOMPUTE account. On the Download page, review the End-User License Agreement (EULA).

Free License

After your XCOMPUTE-CLIENT download completes, a new license key will be generated for you. It may take a few seconds. You will be notified by email of the license, including the 32-byte RSA fingerprint associated with the key.

Available licenses are listed on your user profile account page. Each has the license type (e.g., XCOMPUTE-CLIENT), license key fingerprint, and machine ID (if one has been assigned). See configuration details.

Installation

Mac OS

If a Mac OS package is selected for download, its name will have the form:

xcompute-client_25.4-...-macos-*****.pkg

The software can be installed by double-clicking the package and copying its contents into Applications/.

Following installation, the software machinery will reside under /Applications/xcompute/xcclient.

• An executable named xclauncher is used to initiate the application. The program xcclient.app should be available in your launcher.

Ubuntu/Debian

A Debian package name will have the form:

xcompute-client_25.4-...-amd64.deb

If you can’t double-click the package to install, it can be installed using apt, aptitude, or dpkg. Navigate (cd) to the directory and issue in terminal:

sudo apt install ./xcompute-client*.deb

Note: for apt, the ./ in front of the package filename is mandatory. Otherwise it will try to download the package in the Debian or Ubuntu online repositories, but not find it.

Following installation, the software machinery will reside under /opt/xcompute/xcclient.