Running GUI jobs¶

Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications can be run on CREATE HPC using X11 forwarding, allowing interraction with GUI-based software remotely. This guide will walk you through the steps to set up your SSH configuration and run GUI jobs on compute nodes.

Tip

The login-node is not intended for any memory or compute intensive processes, so the X11 software is available on compute nodes via X forwarding

First request resources from the job scheduler and take note of the compute-node your job is running on. For example:

k1234567@erc-hpc-login1:~$ srun -p interruptible_gpu --gres gpu --pty /bin/bash -l
srun: job waiting for resources...
srun: job allocated resources...
k1234567@erc-hpc-comp123:~$

Now add the following to your SSH config file ~/.ssh/config on your local machine:

Note

This assumes you have set up a standard SSH configuration for CREATE HPC as recommended in our documentation

Host erc-hpc-comp*
    HostName %h
    ProxyJump create
    User <k-number>
    PubkeyAuthentication yes
    IdentityFile <path-to-same-ssh-key>

Now execute the following command from your local machine with the noted down compute node:

1	`ssh -X erc-hpc-comp123`

The -X flag enables X11 forwarding for SSH