Connecting on Windows

Before you can connect to the HPC 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 cluster 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 the cluster’s login node.

Passwordless SSH On Windows Using MobaXterm

You must set up passwordless ssh to ensure that GUI-based applications launch without issues. Please make sure that your keys are added to the authorized.key file in your ~/.ssh directory. This needs to be done anytime you regenerate your SSH keys. If you are having an issue opening an application that needs X11 forwarding, such as MATLAB or Schrodinger, and you recently regenerated your keys, make sure to add your keys to the authorized.key file.

  1. Sign in to the cluster 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 on all 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 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

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, it could be because of the following reasons:

  1. You still need to set up passwordless SSH. If so, you can follow the steps below to set up passwordless SSH.

  2. When requesting a compute node from the login node, you may have forgotten to include the --x11 option. Please see this example srun command.

X11 on Windows

If you use MobaXterm on Windows, X11 forwarding is turned on by default.

Tip

You can test to see if x11 forwarding is working by typing xeyes. This will run a small program that makes a pair of eyes appear to follow your cursor.