The Unix Shell

Connecting to Remote Computers

Learning Objectives

Connect to a remote computer
Copy files to and from a remote computer

Using the shell often lets you use your personal computer more efficiently, but the main reason we’re talking about it today is that most high-performance computational resources (including MSU’s HPCC) are only accessible through the shell. If you want to do research with Avida, you want to be running it on something other than your laptop.

So how do we actually connect to the HPCC? We’re going to use a command called ssh, which stands for “secure shell.” It securely connects your shell to a shell on the computer that you tell it to connect to:

$ ssh nelle@hpcc.msu.edu

Password:

The computer you’re connecting to will ask you for your password, to make sure you’re really who you say you are. After you enter the password for your account on the computer you’re connecting to, you will usually be given some sort of welcome screen. For the MSU HPCC, it will look like this:

Congratulations! You’re in!

You can navigate the file system on the remote computer just like you’ve been navigating the shell on your computer. The only difference is that there’s no graphical user interface to fall back on if you get stuck.

Every computing cluster is a little different. For the rest of this lesson, we’re going to assume you’re using the MSU HPCC. Other systems will probably be similar, but your mileage may vary.

When you first log in to the HPCC, you will be on what’s called the “gateway node.” This is a not-very-powerful computer that’s just suppposed to handle getting people logged in. From here, you can use ssh again to sign into one of the “development nodes” listed on the welcome screen. Try to choose one with “low” usage.

$ ssh dev-intel14

Logging into dev-intel14
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This development node is intended for compiling, debugging, testing, and short interactive jobs. Jobs that need to run longer than two hours should be submitted to the queue. Long-running jobs on development nodes will be killed without warning; jobs using excessive resources may be killed without warning.

Please see the following wiki page for further details:
http://wiki.hpcc.msu.edu/x/nQBe
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TODO: transfering files