PACE A Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment

Good Afternoon Researchers!

We are pleased to announce two new tools to improve interactive job experiences on the PACE clusters: pace-jupyter-notebook and pace-vnc-job!

Jupyter Notebooks are invaluable interactive programming tools that consolidate source code, visualizations, and formatted documentation into a single interface. These notebooks run in a web browser, and Jupyter provides support for many languages by allowing user to switch between desired programing kernels, such as Python, MATLAB, R, Julia, C, Fortran, just to name a few. In addition to providing an interactive environment for development and debugging code, Jupyter Notebooks are an ideal tool for teaching and demonstrating code and results, which PACE has utilized for its recent workshops.

The new utility pace-jupyter-notebook provides an easy to run command for launching Jupyter notebook from the following login nodes/clusters (login-s[X], login-d[x], login7-d[x], testflight-login, zohar, gryphon, login-hive[X], pace-ice, coc-ice…) that will enable Jupyter on your workstation/laptop browser of your choice.  To launch Jupyter, simply login to PACE, and run the command pace-jupyter-notebook -q <QUEUENAME>, where <QUEUENAME> should be replaced with the queue in which you wish to run your job. Once the job starts, follow the three-step prompt to connect to your Jupyter Notebook! Full documentation on the use of pace-jupyter-notebook, including available options to change such as job walltime, processors, memory, and etc., can be found at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/interactiveJobs/jupyterInt/.  Please note that on busy queues, you may experience longer wait times to launch the notebook.

In addition, we are providing a similar utility for running software with graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as MATLAB, Paraview, ANSYS, and many more) on PACE clusters. VNC sessions offer a more robust experience when compared to traditional X11 forwarding. With a local VNC Viewer client, you can connect to the remote desktop on a compute node and interact with the software as if running on your local machine.  Similar to the Jupyter Notebook utility, the new utility pace-vnc-job  provides an easy to run command for launching VNC session on a compute node and connecting your client to the session.  To launch a VNC session, login to PACE, and run the command pace-vnc-job -q <QUEUENAME>, where <QUEUENAME> should be replaced with the queue in which you wish to run your job. Once the job starts, follow the three-step prompt to connect your VNC Viewer to the remote session, start up the software you wish to run. Full documentation on the use of pace-vnc-job, including available options to change such as job walltime, processors, memory, and etc.,, can be found at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/interactiveJobs/setupVNC_Session/.  Again, please note that on busy queues, you may experience longer wait times to launch a VNC session.

Happy Interactive computing!

Best,
The PACE Team