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Scientific Computing and Data / High Performance Computing / Documentation / Open Ondemand

Open Ondemand

The Scientific Computing and Data department has now installed the NSF supported Open OnDemand service portal tp access Minerva. This product offers a fully compliant job management and desktop portal requiring minimal knowledge of linux HPC environments and no end-user installation requirements other than an up-to-date web browser (Chrome or Firefox recommended)

Please note that you will not be completely logged out of the Open OnDemand application until you both click on the logout icon and close the browser.

Getting Started

Logging into the Minerva web portal

Please note that new user home directories are not created until the first login using standard SSH. If you are new Minerva user be sure to connect via SSH before attempting to access Open OnDemand. Failing to do so will produce an error from Open OnDemand regarding the lack of home directory.

Launching interactive Desktop job on a compute nodes.

  • Click ‘Interactive Apps> Chimera Desktop’ on the menu bar
  • Select OnDemand queue for a desktop on the main cluster or Private queue to start the desktop on your private node if you have one.
    • If Private queue selected, select the specific node on which to start your desktop. Selecting First available will start your desktop on the first Private node on which you are eligible to run.
  • Enter a valid Minerva LSF project account.
  • Choose number of cores you require. (default is 1 core; maximum 48). All cores will be on the same node. (hosts=1)
  • Choose memory per core in GB. (default is 1GB; maximum is 192GB; specifying 0GB indicates the full node)
  • Choose number of hours you require desktop. (default 1 hour; maximum 6 days)
  • Select email notification if you’d like to know via email when the desktop begins to run.
  • Click on Launch

Submissions will be queued in the special ondemand queue and the status of the job will appear on the My interactive Sessions page (Automatically displayed) . The status will change from Submitted to Running when the job starts and you will be notified via email if that option was selected.

Click on Launch Chimera Desktop and he XFCE desktop will start up. The side tool bar (small arrow to left) allows one to send custom key commands and set connection parameters. A terminal emulator is available by clicking on the Terminal icon at the bottom.

When navigating the /sc/arion/work or /sc/arion/projects folders, populating the icons for all of the sub-folders can be slow. Significant speedup can be obtained by just typing  in the sub-folder name, e.g., /sc/arion/work/joeuser01, in the navigation box on the header line.

Other Servers Available
  • Code Server – A VS Code server
  • Jupyter Server – Can provide a JupyterLab or Jupyter Notebook server. Python 3 and Python 2 are both supported. GPU accelerators are available for Jupyter server.
  • Rstudio Server – Provides an Rstudio server environment. Currently R/4.3.1 is the only version available.

The initiation of these servers is essentially the same as for the Chimera Desktop. Any differences are self-explanatory.