Running older Isaac Sim from container

Omniverse Isaac Sim
1

We have built robots with Isaac SDK 2021 and simulated them with Isaac Sim 2021.2.1 and REB (robot engine bridge). This is all working natively on 12th gen core i9 LInux PCs with Ubuntu 20.04.06 and RTX3060 with driver 535.

Now we have a new 14th gen core i9 PC with Ubuntu 24.04.1 and RTX4080 with driver 550.120, which runs Isaac Sim 4.2 natively but it is really only for ROS developers, not Isaac SDK developers.

So in order to run Isaac Sim 2021 we did the container installation and transferred the Isaac Sim assets. Isaac Sim 2021 running from container starts up and shows thumbnails for the various assets and demos but the screen stays blank when trying to render anything.

Here’ are some of the messages from inside the Docker:

|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Driver Version: 550.120     | Graphics API: Vulkan
|=============================================================================================|
| GPU | Name                             | Active | LDA | GPU Memory | Vendor-ID | LUID       |
|     |                                  |        |     |            | Device-ID | UUID       |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 0   | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080          | Yes: 0 |     | 16376   MB | 10de      | 0          |
|     |                                  |        |     |            | 2704      | b952c9b1.. |
|=============================================================================================|
| OS: Linux o9, Version: 6.8.0-50-generic
| XServer Vendor: The X.Org Foundation, XServer Version: 12101011 (1.21.1.11)
| Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-14900K | Cores: Unknown | Logical: 32
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Total Memory (MB): 64067 | Free Memory: 59562
| Total Page/Swap (MB): 8191 | Free Page/Swap: 8191
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
2024-12-10 22:47:45 [504ms] [Warning] [gpu.foundation.plugin] Different GPUs have different availalbe VRAM. The texture streaming system will be limited to the lower VRAM number
[0.658s] [ext: omni.kit.test-0.0.0] startup
[0.698s] [ext: omni.ui-2.5.3] startup

and then lots of messages like this:

[1.052s] [ext: omni.kit.window.viewport-0.0.0] startup
2024-12-10 22:47:46 [1,054ms] [Error] [gpu.foundation.plugin] Cannot load shader file 'rtx/scenedb/SparseMemCopy.compute.hlsl'.
2024-12-10 22:47:46 [1,054ms] [Error] [gpu.foundation.plugin] buildShaderAsync() failed: rtx/scenedb/SparseMemCopy.compute.hlsl
2024-12-10 22:47:46 [1,054ms] [Error] [gpu.foundation.plugin] PsoCompute::createPipeline and shader loading failed. RtxResult: 3

and this:

[2.943s] [ext: omni.isaac.sim-2021.2.1] startup
[2.943s] app started
2024-12-10 22:47:48 [2,916ms] [Warning] [omni.usd] No hydra engine was found with name rtx running at tickrate -1
2024-12-10 22:47:48 [2,916ms] [Warning] [omni.usd] Failed to create Hydra Engine for viewport!
2024-12-10 22:47:48 [2,917ms] [Warning] [gpu.foundation.plugin] Post processing operations requested for texture /tmp/carb.Z1PFhR/filter.28x28.png, but no renderer was initialized. Skipping post-processing ops

There is only one GPU in the system and the on-board integrated graphics card is disabled.

What do those error messages mean ? We tried using an RTX3060 instead of the 4080, didn’t make a difference. Deleting all caches or even deleting the whole docker image and fresh setup with 3060 didn’t make a difference.

2

Could you provide the link to the Isaac Sim documentation for version 2021.2.1? Also, could you explain why you haven’t upgraded to the latest version, 4.2.0?

3

Thanks so much for your reply.

Regarding Nvidia’s own Isaac Sim 2021documentation, Nvidia used to have previous versions online but the documentation links keep changing and we can’t find it now. Some of it is included in the Docker image, so if you mount the nvcr.io/nvidia/isaac-sim:2021.2.1 image then you could see it.

Regarding Isaac Sim 4.2, we tried it and it has impressive frame rates when DLSS is selected, however we are building physical warehouse AMR robots and we often refer to the really nice “Factory of the Future” (FoF) demo and “Cart Delivery” demo which work with Isaac SDK and require the REB (Robot Engine Bridge) which was apparently dropped in all versions of Isaac Sim since 2021.2.1

Since the original post, we were able to run Isaac Sim 2021 outside of Docker on the same system, but when launching Docker with this command we can’t run Isaac Sim 2021

To launch the Docker image, we used the same command line as shown in your Isaac Sim 4.2 documentation except for referring to the 2021 image

docker run --name isaac-sim --entrypoint bash -it --runtime=nvidia --gpus all -e “ACCEPT_EULA=Y” --rm --network=host
-e “PRIVACY_CONSENT=Y”
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/kit:/isaac-sim/kit/cache:rw
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/ov:/root/.cache/ov:rw
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/pip:/root/.cache/pip:rw
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/glcache:/root/.cache/nvidia/GLCache:rw
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/computecache:/root/.nv/ComputeCache:rw
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/logs:/root/.nvidia-omniverse/logs:rw
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/data:/root/.local/share/ov/data:rw
-v ~/docker/isaac-sim/documents:/root/Documents:rw \

nvcr.io/nvidia/isaac-sim:2021.2.1

Regardless of whether we try the headless or regular app launch, we get errors like the following when launching from Docker. But it works on the same system without Docker.

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Below is a screenshot of the Factory of the Future demo that is missing in Isaac Sim 4.2

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