Connecting to Discovery using Windows

You connect to Discovery using a secure shell program to initiate an SSH session to sign in to Discovery. This topic is about how to connect using Windows. See Connecting to Discovery with a Mac for information about connecting with a Mac.

Before you can connect to Discovery on a Windows computer, you’ll need to download a terminal program, such as MobaXterm or PuTTY. We recommend MobaXterm, as you can also use it for file transfer, whereas with other SSH programs, you would need a separate file transfer program.

To connect to Discovery with MobaXterm:

  1. Open MobaXterm.
  2. Click Session, then click SSH as the connection type.
  3. In Remote Host, type login.discovery.neu.edu, make sure Port is set to 22, and click OK. (OPTIONAL: You can type your Northeastern username and password on MobaXterm, and it will save that information every time you sign in. If you opt to do this, you will be connected to Discovery after you click OK.)
  4. At the prompt, type your Northeastern username and press Enter.
  5. Type your Northeastern password and press Enter. Note that the cursor does not move as you type your password. This is expected behavior.

You are now connected to Discovery at a login node.

Watch this video to see how to connect to Discovery with MobaXterm. If you do not see any controls on the video, right click on the video to see viewing options.

Passwordless ssh

You need to setup passwordless ssh to ensure that GUI-based applications will launch without any issues. You also need to make sure that your keys are added to the authorized.key file. This needs to be done anytime you regenerate your keys. If you’re having an issue with opening an application that need X11 forwarding, such as MATLAB or Schrodinger, and you recently regenerated your keys, make sure to add your keys to the authorized.key file.

Note

Errors that you can see on Windows when launching a GUI-based program include the following:

Error: unable to open display localhost:19.0

Launch failed: non-zero return code

If you are getting these types of errors, follow the steps below to set up passwordless ssh.

To setup passwordless ssh:

  1. Sign into Discovery using MobaXterm.
  2. Type cd ~/.ssh to move to your ssh folder.
  3. Type ssh-keygen -t rsa to generate your key files.
  4. Press Enter to all of the prompts (do not generate a passphrase). If prompted to overwrite a file, type Y.
  5. Type cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys. This adds the contents of your public key file to a new line in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

The following video tutorial goes through this process.

Next steps

After you are connected, you can run jobs either in interactive mode with srun or submit a script using sbatch. See Using srun and Using sbatch for more information.

To load and run software, see Software overview. To find out more about the hardware and partitions on Discovery, see Hardware overview and Partitions.

To watch an introductory training video, go to Northeastern’s LinkedIn Learning page.