Connecting with X2GO remote desktop environment

Many researchers need access to a remote desktop environment to support running GUI based applications in an interactive manner. For most use cases, we recommend using our web based Open On Demand service which includes support for remote desktop sessions: https://login.rc.asu.edu/pun/sys/dashboard

However, there are some GUI based applications which require support for OpenGL and will not currently run under the Open On Demand service.

To support these applications, we provide access with a remote desktop system is called X2GO ( https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php ).

Connecting to X2GO on Agave

Install the client:

The first thing you’ll need to do is download the client software package for x2go, which can be found here : https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goclient

Create a session:

Once the client is installed, launch it and create a new session. A create session window will open. Fill out the fields on the first tab of this window as follows:

Open

The important fields are:

Session Name: Agave Supercomputer X2Go Remote Desktop (name as you prefer)

Host: remotesession.agave.rc.asu.edu

Session type: ICEWM

Once these fields have been filled in, click on OK to save the session

Connect to X2GO:

Once your session is created, it will appear within the x2go client application as follows:

Open

Launch the session by single clicking on the icon for this session. This will launch a new connection and present you with a login window:

Enter your ASURITE login and password and click OK to connect. A window similar to the following should open:

Launch an interactive session:

Once you have your remote desktop, it should auto-load a command prompt. If not right click a clear spot in the X2Go desktop then left click “Command Prompt”

Before doing work, be sure to start an interactive session with the interactive command. This is because login nodes such as remotesession are only meant as an entry point and have very limited resources (low memory and CPU).

In the example below we are requesting 24 cores using the “gmascaro” partition for four hours using the wildfire queue since we only have secondary access to gmascaro. (All switches are optional including -p and -q. If no switches are provided it will automatically request 1 core for 24 hours in the serial partition with the “normal” queue)

Once we have a compute node we can run our applications and we should get the graphical output:

Important Information:

Do Not Disconnect Until You Are Ready To Quit:

While there is no set timeout for remote desktop sessions, if you do disconnect, your remote session will be ended. It is not currently possible to have a persistent session that you can disconnect from and then reconnect to later on.

If you have a program that you need to run "in the background" then please try to run it through an sbatch script if possible.

Feel free to contact us if you have questions about how to use sbatch scripts.

Connecting From Off Campus

If you are connecting from outside of ASU's campus network, you will need to install and launch the Cisco VPN Client before connecting.