About DOMINO running on headless server

[rstonghua]

I really appreciate the work you've done on the dynamic environment benchmarks. It's great to see such thorough testing and performance evaluation in realistic scenarios!
I have a question regarding deployment: Can DOMINO be run on a headless server (i.e., without a display/GUI)? I'm planning to deploy it in a server environment without X11 forwarding or a desktop environment, and I wanted to check if this is supported or if there are any specific configurations needed for headless operation.

[FangHeng]

Thanks for the kind words and for the question.

Yes, DOMINO should be able to run on a headless Linux server without X11 forwarding or a desktop environment for the standard data collection / evaluation workflow.

In our setup, the on-screen viewer is only created when visualization is explicitly enabled (e.g. when render_freq > 0), and the default dynamic task configs use render_freq: 0. So for normal headless runs, you should not need a GUI session.

That said, DOMINO is not fully display-stack-free. The simulator still relies on SAPIEN rendering, so you will need a working NVIDIA GPU + Vulkan graphics stack even in headless mode. In particular:

• vulkaninfo should work on the server
• if you run inside Docker, please include NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,utility,graphics as noted in the README

A simple sanity check after installation is:
python script/test_render.py

If that passes, the environment should be ready for headless execution. If you enable viewer-based visualization, then a display backend would be needed. You are very welcome to give it a try, and if you run into any issues, please feel free to continue the discussion. We would be happy to help.