Running Graphical Applications With X11 Forwarding
Graphical applications such as Ansys Workbench or MATLAB can be ran on a compute node and viewed on your local machine using X11 forwarding. X11 is a display protocol capable of operating over the network
This is possible with two approaches:
Connecting the the Login Node with X11 forwarding enabled and then using Slurm’s (Slurm is the job scheduler) X11 forwarding functionality to run a job on a compute node
Getting a Job Allocation on a compute node and connecting to it directly
The former approach is detailed below. Please log in and see https://docs.lovelace.plymouth.ac.uk/private/ for instructions on the latter case.
Slurm X11 Forwarding
First connect to the lovelace cluster with X11 forwarding enabled (please Login and access the internal site https://docs.lovelace.plymouth.ac.uk/private/ for instructions on this). Assuming that you have set up an ssh host named lovelace referring to the login node and you are on a supported platform, simply run:
ssh -XY username@lovelace
Next, run the application using srun with its --x11 option. In the following example, we use the xeyes application
srun --x11 xeyes
You should then see a pair of googly eyes on your desktop. If you see this, then X11 forwarding is working.
Examples of software that could be used with X11 forwarding include: