The Desktop app let you run an XFCE desktop environment on a cluster node.
When starting a Desktop session, you may customize the resources allocated to the session and other characteristics of the dispatched SLURM job. If you choose a partition (group of nodes) containing GPU nodes, you may choose the number and type of GPU to allocate to your session.
By default your Desktop session will run for one hour but you can increase this value if required.
Click Launch to submit the Destop job to the queue. The wait time depends on the current load of the cluster. Requesting smaller, shorter jobs may faciliate shorter wait times.
When your Desktop is ready, you can click the Launch Desktop: IGBMC button. In most cases, the default compression and image quality will suffice. If you do have problems with image quality you can adjust these settings as necessary.
With the Desktop session running and open, you should be able to run any applications that have a graphical user interface (GUI).
To start an application, open the Desktop terminal and load the software you would like to use using module.
Then start the application from the command line.
For instance, to use Matlab, type :
module load matlab
or
module load matlab/R2021aAnd then start Matlab
matlab
When you don’t need your Desktop session anymore, make sure to delete it from the My interactive sessions page.
