Surrey Research Computing
Open OnDemand¶
Open OnDemand (OOD) provides a user-friendly web portal to Surrey’s HPC resources, ideal for beginners with minimal knowledge of Linux and SLURM scheduler commands. It provides graphical user interfaces for tools like MATLAB, JupyterLab, and VS Code, along with simplified file management and job handling. Users can submit and monitor jobs, access the shell, and run interactive apps, streamlining HPC access and usability.
To connect to Eureka2 Open OnDemand, visit https://eureka2-ondemand.surrey.ac.uk.
To connect to AISurrey Open OnDemand, visit https://aisurrey-ondemand.surrey.ac.uk.
You will need to have requested access to Eureka2 and AISurrey to be able to log in. You can access the Open OnDemand webpage directly on campus or via VPN offcampus.
Note
Open OnDemand (OOD) is currently available on both Eureka2 and AISURREY. At the moment, Eureka2 OOD provides a wider range of GUI tools compared to AISURREY. However, this may change in response to user demand.
Screenshot of the Eureka2-ondemand landing page.¶
After logging into OnDemand you will be presented with a landing page and a number of options.
Files¶
The File menu allows you to view and edit files in your home directory, scratch space, or other directories accessible through the cluster. It also notifies you if you are nearing your space quota allowance.
You can navigate to a specific location by selecting it from the dropdown menu. From there, you can download, upload, create, delete, open, and edit files. This makes OOD a convenient alternative to FTP and other command-line tools for transferring data between the cluster and your local machine.
Most file operations can be completed by selecting a file in the main window pane and using the options in the “…” (dots) menu.
Screenshot of the ood-files menu page.¶
Clicking the Open in Terminal button while a file is selected will open a shell session in the current folder containing the selected file.
Jobs¶
The Jobs menu provides tools to monitor, create, edit, and schedule compute jobs.
The Active Jobs tab allows you to view and manage active jobs on the cluster. You can choose to display only your jobs or all jobs running on the cluster. Additionally, you have the option to cancel your own jobs directly from this tab.
The Job Composer tool enables you to create job submission scripts. You can: Start from scratch, Use a provided template, or Replicate a script from a previous job. For detailed guidance on using the Job Composer, refer to OSC’s job management video tutorial.
Clusters¶
The Clusters menu in Open OnDemand allows you to access a Bash shell on the login nodes of both the Eureka2 and AISurrey clusters. This feature provides the same command-line interface (CLI) experience as connecting to the login nodes via SSH using a terminal, whether on Linux, macOS , or Windows.
Warning
Make sure not to run any jobs/intensive operations on the login node, it is for interacting with files and jobs on the cluster.
Interactive applications¶
The Interactive Applications section enables you to launch various graphical applications directly through Open OnDemand. Currently, supported applications include Remote Desktop (available only on debug nodes), FSL, MATLAB, ANSYS, Jupyter Lab, RStudio, and VSCode.
The available GUI applications may differ between the Eureka2 and AISurrey clusters and can be updated based on user demand. These tools provide an interactive and user-friendly way to work on the cluster.
My Interactive Sessions
The My Interactive Sessions menu allows you to view and manage all your currently running interactive applications. From this menu, you can monitor details such as the node/core count, session status, time remaining, and the host name of the node running the session. By clicking on the node name under Host, you can directly open a shell into the node.
Warning
Closing the session tab or the entire web browser will not end the session. If you no longer need the session, please terminate it using the Delete button to avoid wasting resources.
Screenshot of the OOD-myinteractive sessions.¶
Further Step-by-step Guides¶
On the SRC SharePoint site, you can access a training session that includes recordings, slides, and several step-by-step guides. These guides cover topics such as submitting jobs with Python code and running simple deep learning tasks using the MATLAB GUI tool. The training session is designed based on Eureka2, but most of the guides are also applicable to AISurrey.
Cluster-Specific OOD Configurations:¶
OOD is provided with many interactive apps and can run conda environments.
OOD has a limited selection of interactive apps, jobs should run only within apptainer images.