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Prerequisites

To access a supercomputer, users have a Pawsey account, comprising a username and a password. The account must also be a member of an active project allocation on the selected supercomputer. For new users, an account creation email with instructions is sent when you receive an allocation or are added to a project.

Introduction

Pawsey supercomputers are accessed remotely through the SSH protocol. Most of the time users employ the ssh command-line tool installed on their computers, which allows executing commands through a terminal window; other programs implementing the SSH protocol may be used. To execute programs that display a graphical interface you can use X forwarding over SSH.

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Use SSH to connect to a supercomputer

The login node of a Pawsey supercomputer is reachable through the Internet at an assigned public hostname. The hostname of the login nodes of each Pawsey's supercomputer is listed in table 1. The linux command ssh should be used by users to connect to the login node of a remote host, as shown in the following line.

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An SSH key is an access credential in the SSH protocol. Its function is similar to that of username and password but enables automated processes and single sign-on users.

Login nodes

The hostname of a supercomputing system is often a pseudonym of several login nodes that the system may have. When connecting remotely, connections are randomly placed on a login node from where you interact with the rest of the system using a round-robin DNS technique. The actual hostname of the login node ("setonix-1" in the example below) can be easily obtained by executing the hostname Linux command after an SSH connection has been established. Terminal 1 illustrates an SSH connection to a login node and outputting the hostname.

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Perform I/O-intensive operations through the data mover system (data-mover.pawsey.org.au), whose nodes are explicitly devoted to that, or else submit them to the copy partition, which uses the data mover nodes.

Graphical interfaces

Unlike personal computers running operating systems such as Windows, MacOS or Ubuntu, our systems do not provide a graphical windowing environment. Nevertheless, some of the tools provided on Pawsey systems do have Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). To allow these tools to control your local display and open up a new GUI (such as for a debugger), use the X forwarding option "-X" of SSH, as explained in Use Running Graphical Applications (GUI) Programs with X over SSHon Supercomputers.

Remote development using Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a popular free and open-source code editing application that can be deployed on Linux, macOS and Windows. It has an integrated terminal within its user interface that removes the need to switch between command-line tasks and code editing. The functionality of VS Code can easily be extended by installing extensions. These extensions allow for almost arbitrary language support, debugging or remote development.

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Preventing unexpected behaviour from Visual Studio Code

If you want to end your remote session, click the green box in the lower left corner. In the input box that opens, select the "Close Remote Connection" option. If you simply close your VS Code window, some server-side components of VS Code will continue to run remotely.

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$ rm -rf ~/.vscode-server/

Preventing Visual Studio Code overloading the login nodes

The Visual Studio Code filewatcher and file searcher (rg) indexes all the files you have access to in your workspace. If you have a large dataset (e.g. machine learning) this can take a lot of resources on the login nodes. Please note that making some changes to your settings.json file on Setonix can prevent this issue. 

# Create the settings.json file

$ touch ~/.vscode-server/data/Machine/settings.json

# add the following information to settings.json with your favourite text editor

"files.watcherExclude": {
  "**/.git/objects/**": true,
  "**/.git/subtree-cache/**": true,     
  "**/node_modules/*/**": true,
  "/usr/local/**": true,
  "/scratch/**": true},

"search.followSymlinks": false,

"search.exclude": {     
  "**/.git/objects/**": true,
  "**/.git/subtree-cache/**": true,     
  "**/node_modules/*/**": true,
  "/usr/local/**": true,
  "/scratch/**": true},

Related pages

• Pawsey Conditions of Use
• Use Running Graphical Applications (GUI) Programs with X over SSHon Supercomputers

External links

• Visual Studio Code
• git
• Remote Development using SSH

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