Installing XCOMPUTE-CLIENT

Installing XCOMPUTE-CLIENT#

XCOMPUTE-CLIENT is built to run on recent Linux/x86-64 systems. Packages are built to directly install on Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, but compressed tarfiles are available to attempt installation on non-Debian Linux systems.

Prerequisites#

XCOMPUTE Account#

To use XCOMPUTE-CLIENT, first Sign Up for a free license. The generated cryptographic license is used to authenticate your use of XCOMPUTE-CLIENT to XCOMPUTE-SERVER, thus allowing you to use the server’s resources.

Hardware Requirements#

While XCOMPUTE-CLIENT makes modest use of a host system’s CPU, it makes much more use of the system’s GPU.

For x86-64, the CPU should support the x86-64-v2 microarchtecture. Notably, it supports CPU 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.

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

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

The host system’s GPU needs to support the OpenGL 4.1 graphics standard, inroduced in July 2010. The GPU manufacturer typically provides the libraries and device drivers for OpenGL support. (Consult the manufacturer’s GPU documentation for details.)

Software Requirements#

XCOMPUTE-CLIENT depends on installation of certain libraries and frameworks. The major ones are:

  • Qt5 user interface framework. This is typically provided by the host system’s package manager system.

  • 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.

A few other libraries are needed as well. If XCOMPUTE-CLIENT is installed as a Debian package, the needed libraries will automatically be installed. If it installed from a compressed tar file, packages will need to be installed manually in advance.

For Ubuntu and Debian-based systems, root privilege will be needed to install packages. This can be done in a single command:

sudo apt-get install libbsd0 lsof libstdc++6 libgcc-s1 libc6

For macOS systems, XCOMPUTE-CLIENT depends on packages from Homebrew. To install them:

brew install libomp glm qt@5 glew glfw

Download Package#

Login to your XCOMPUTE account. On the Download page, review the End-User License Agreement (EULA), if you have not done so, and select a version of XCOMPUTE-CLIENT that is appropriate for your computer.

License Key and Fingerprint#

After your XCOMPUTE-CLIENT download completes, a new license key will be generated for you. You will be notified by email of the license, including the a 32-byte fingerprint to identify the key.

(The download step may be modified in a later release to ask you if you want to generate a license. You will be able to skip license key generation if you have a license that has not yet been assigned to a machine.)

The licenses that you have available to you will be listed on your user profile account page. Each has the license type (e.g., XCOMPUTE-CLIENT), license key fingerprint, and (if assigned) machine ID.

Alongside the package, the generated license and key file acts as a unique network identifier and can only be used on one machine. These files must be copied into a specific location to activate the software. See configuration details.

Selecting a package#

XCOMPUTE-CLIENT is currently available in the following platforms: On the download page, they are given generic names:

  • Debian packages (.deb) for Ubuntu, Debian, and other Debian-derived systems, e.g., xcompute-client_25.1-latest-linux-u20_amd64.deb.

  • Compressed tarfiles (.tar.xz) for other Linux systems, e.g., xcompute-client_25.1-latest-linux-u20_amd64.tar.xz.

  • Compressed tarfiles (.tar.xz) for macOS systems, e.g., xcompute-client_25.1-latest-macos-m12_x86-64.tar.gz

The Linux packages were built against Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, and 24.04, the last several long-term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu. The specific release is denoted in the name by u20, u22, and u24. The downloaded file will have the full version ID in the filename. 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.

In the case of Linux systems, the tarballs built for Ubuntu and Debian may work for Fedora and RHEL if certain manual steps are taken after installation.

The macOS packages were built against systems denoted by mNN where NN is the major version number of macOS. For example, m12 stands for macOS Monterey (version 12); m14 for macOS Sonoma (version 14). (For the downloaded file, rather than ‘m12_x86-64, the filename will have m12x2for macOS version 12 on x86-64-v2 microarchitecture, or m14a8for macOS version 14 on Apple Silicon, which uses the ARMv8 architecture (hence, a8).

Installation: Ubuntu/Debian#

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

xcompute-client_25.1-...-amd64.deb

The package can be installed using apt, aptitude, or dpkg. For example,

sudo apt install ./xcompute-client_25.1-0319.b0b7cd0b-u20_amd64.deb

(Note that 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.)

When installed, the XCOMPUTE-CLIENT software itself will reside under /opt/xcompute/xcclient.

Installation: compressed tarfile#

[DESCRIBE] Linux x86-64

[DESCRIBE] macOS, x86-64 or Apple Silicon