Re: [HTCondor-users] Condor and Photoshop action

[Todd Tannenbaum <tannenba@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/3/2016 8:02 AM, Gandor Florian swisstopo wrote:

> It seems to me that Photoshop needs the GUI to run actions and that
> HTCondor can’t run applications that need the GUI to work…
>
> In advance, thanks for your answer,
>
> Florian

HTCondor is able to run GUI-based applications on the Windows operating 
system, so long as these applications do not block waiting for keyboard 
or mouse input (i.e. the GUI application must be able to run as a batch 
job). How this works is HTCondor dynamically creates non-visible desktop 
for each slot on the execute node, and it will launch the job on this 
non-visible desktop. The result is the GUI job runs on the machine 
without windows popping up on the visible desktop, thus allowing a GUI 
job to effectively "run in the background" without disturbing the 
desktop user.

However, at times you may want HTCondor to run your GUI job on the 
visible desktop. For instance, perhaps you have a GUI job that appears 
to hang or otherwise fail - what could be happening is the job detected 
some problem and popped up an error window, but the only way to see this 
error window is to have the job run on the visible desktop. To 
accomplish this, as the system administrator you will need to 1) tell 
Windows to allow the HTCondor service to access the visible desktop if 
you are running on Windows Vista or above, and then 2) tell HTCondor to 
use the visible desktop.

See the HOWTO at
  https://htcondor-wiki.cs.wisc.edu/index.cgi/wiki?p=UseVisibleDesktopVista


Hope the above helps
Todd