Sol can be accessed through the Open OnDemand web portal. Open OnDemand (OOD) is an NSF-funded open-source HPC portal. The goal of OOD is to provide an easy way for system administrators to provide web access to their HPC resources, including, but not limited to:
- Plugin-free web experience
- Easy file management
- Command-line shell access
- Job management and monitoring across different batch servers and resource managers
- Graphical desktop environments and desktop applications
Traditionally, HPC resources can only be accessed via a ssh client either in built for Linux & Mac OSX or third party tools such as Putty, MobaXterm, etc on Windows. By providing a web interface to access HPC resources, OOD provides the ability to login from devices such as smartphones, tablets, etc that do not have an easy to use SSH client.
Connecting to HPC Portal
To connect to the portal, use the url https://hpcportal.cc.lehigh.edu, VPN required to access from off campus location.
Login using your Lehigh credential, (Sol account required). The OOD dashboard will show you the current Message of the Day. The dashboard has several dropdown menus that you need to get familiar with for using OOD. You will not see the "Develop" dropdown. This is an admin feature for developing applications that eventually will be added to OOD.
Shell Access
Advanced users who prefer access to the shell, can click on Sol Cluster followed by Shell Access.
This provides a shell within a browser that eliminates the need for a SSH client on your local system.
Managing and Transferring Files
Open OnDemand provides a convenient way to edit and transfer files. The former reduces the need to learn how to use vi/vim or emacs. It is advantageous to learn how to use vi/vim or emacs, especially vim when trying to read large files in the order of a few GB.
Job Management and Submission
Application
The following applications are available on the portal
- Virtual Desktops
- Jupyter Notebooks
- RStudio Server
- Abaqus CAE
- Ansys Workbench
- Maple
- MATLAB
- Mathematica
Any application that has a GUI can in principle be accessed in the Virtual Desktop application. However, it should be noted that a full desktop environment is not installed on the compute nodes. Instead, MATE and XFCE desktop environments are bundled in a singularity container. There may be some peculiarities with the software you are interested in using that this setup may not provide you with a good user experience. Please see Virtual Desktops for more information.