Running Graphical Applications With X11 Forwarding

Note

This functionality can also be achieved by using JupyterHub as given in JupyterHub. This section is included for information but is essentially obsolete.

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: