GUI HPC VNC jobs for Mac/Linux Clients

  1. not essential, but useful: create password-less access to zeus, in the terminal of your OSX/Linux do:
ssh-keygen

(just press Enter few times, do not enter any passwords or “secrets”)

Changing username to your HPC login name, do

ssh-copy-id username@zeus1.coventry.ac.uk

(enter HPC password as prompted, this will copy public ssh key created above to your zeus profile, now you can connect to zeus without entering password -> very useful for following steps). Only need to be done ONCE (per client computer)!

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Next steps can be scripted, i.e. put code lines into shell script and call it later with different node name or number (node name can be passed as a parameter to the script)

2. Launch VNC server job in the zeus queue, say, on 1 GPU node asking for 1 K80 GPU and exclusive access to the node (remove –exclusive if the whole node is not needed)

 

ssh yourHPClogin@zeus1.coventry.ac.uk sbatch --exclusive -N1 --gres=gpu:K80:1 -t 24:00:00 /share/apps/slurm/vnc.slurm

(omit –gres=gpu:K80:1 if no GPUs needed)

(generally -N X in the above code line means ask for X compute nodes)

Check which node was assigned to your VNC job in the queue:

ssh username@zeus1.coventry.ac.uk squeue -u $USERNAME

Say the result of that is compute node zeus400 assigned to your VNC job (you can always check with “qstat” or “squeue -u $USER” on zeus or on zeus website (show queue)

 

3. Establish tunnel from your Mac to target node (e.g. zeus400) via zeus2.coventry.ac.uk (or zeus1):

ssh -L localhost:5901:zeus400:5901 zeus2.coventry.ac.uk

 

4. Now launch vncviewer on your Mac and connect to localhost:1 (that must bring you to the VNC session at zeus400:1

vncviewer localhost:1

(or any other way you launch it on Macs…)
Alex Pedcenko

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