Faster time to science with the Open OnDemand portal

Pitt CRC now offers the Open OnDemand portal to connect you to high-performance computing without learning to program at the command line. Just log in and begin working. Open OnDemand is available now for the HTC cluster to provide graphical interface capabilities and easy web access to HPC resources, including:

  • Easy file management
  • Command-line shell access
  • Graphical desktop environments and desktop applications

With OnDemand, CRC users can work through a web browser with no client software to install and configure. Users can upload and download files; create, edit, submit and monitor jobs; and run GUI applications (e.g. RStudio Server and Jupyter Notebook).

You can connect through a Firefox web browser at htc.crc.pitt.edu using your Pitt username and password. The server is behind Pitt’s firewall, so off-campus users must be on a Pitt VPN with Firewall-SAM-USERS-Pulse rule. For questions contact crc.pitt.edu/UserSupport.

According to one survey (illustrated above) measuring new users on Open OnDemand versus new users working at the command line, OnDemand users showed 76 less hours between getting an account and signing in, and 20 less hours between first logging on and running the first job. For questions contact crc.pitt.edu/UserSupport.

Note: the graphic at the left is based on a data set of median times from 1,712 Ohio Supercomputer Center accounts in 2017.

Monday, September 7, 2020