Linux Desktop

We have setup Linux desktop access via web accessible VNC on https://hpc.grit.ucsb.edu. The VMs are Ubuntu 24.04 with an xcfe desktop and a small handful of utilities installed including the spyder python IDE. 

To launch a desktop session select the Desktop option from the Interactive Apps drop down:

You will then be prompted to select the resources for the VM:

• Account: your SLURM account, this will be slurm_users by default, or slurm_labname for those with private resources
  
• Partition: grit_nodes is the default 
• Job Duration: set a number of hours for your Jupyter Notebook to run, after this expires your job will be stopped.
• CPUs: set the number of CPU cores to be allotted for this task, with a maximum of 24. (this maximum is selected so as to not consume 100% of the cores on any of the HPC systems in the GRIT stack)
• RAM: set the amount of RAM in gigabytes available to this task, with a maximum of 256GB. (this maximum is selected so as to not consume 100% of the RAM on any of the HPC systems in the GRIT stack)
• Job Name: this field is optional and may be used to differentiate tasks if multiple are running under the same account. 

account will be your netID / GRIT username

partition will be grit_nodes unless you are instructed otherwise

Remember when selecting CPU and RAM options that the desktop may sit in the queue for some time before the resources are available on one of the GRIT HPC cluster systems. 

Currently the only available desktop environment is xcfe but this is subject to change. 

Once the form is filled out select Launch you will be forwarded to your interactive sessions list:

Note that it may take some additional time to complete the vm deployment and until it completes clicking the connect to Desktop button will send you to a 404 error page. 

Select connect to Desktop and a new tab will open in your browser with a noVNC session to your remote desktop: 

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Restoring Previous Sessions

Restore the previous session (GUI method)

1. Open Settings Manager

2. Go to Session and Startup

3. Click the General tab

4. Enable:

   • Automatically save session on logout

Then when you log out and log back in, Xfce restores the previous windows.

You can also manually restore:

1. Open Settings Manager → Session and Startup

2. Go to the Session tab

3. Click Restore Session

If the session got corrupted

Sometimes the saved session files break. You can reset them:

Then log out/in again.

Where the session is stored

Xfce stores session state in:

You can sometimes recover a previous session by copying files there.

Available Software

Core System Utilities

• Shells: bash, csh, tcsh, zsh

• Editors: emacs, nano, vi

• Misc: sshpass, dc, ncal, cmake

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Desktop & GUI Environment

• Image Viewers

  • feh

  • eog (Eye of GNOME)

   

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Web Browsers & Editors

• Firefox 

• Visual Studio Code 

• Positron 

• PyCharm CE 
  

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Scientific & Analytical Tools

• CDO — Climate Data Operators

• GrADS — Grid Analysis and Display System

• Python Environment

  • python3, python3-pip, python3-venv, pipx

  • User-installable Python packages supported via pip or pipx

• Compilers & Build Tools

  • build-essential, gfortran, pkg-config

• Java

  • openjdk-17-jdk

• Statistical / Bayesian Tools

  • jags

• IDL / ENVI
• MATLAB

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R and Statistical Computing

Base R

• r-base, r-base-dev

System Libraries for R Packages

Includes all required development libraries for common CRAN and spatial packages:

• libcurl4-openssl-dev, libssl-dev, libxml2-dev, libgit2-dev, libssh2-1-dev

• libcairo2-dev, libfontconfig1-dev, libfreetype6-dev, libharfbuzz-dev, libfribidi-dev

• libjpeg-dev, libpng-dev, libtiff-dev, libmagick++-dev

• libgdal-dev, libgeos-dev, libproj-dev, libudunits2-dev, libgeotiff-dev, libsqlite3-dev, libspatialindex-dev

• libnetcdf-dev, netcdf-bin

• unixodbc-dev, libpq-dev

• mesa-common-dev, libglu1-mesa-dev, freeglut3-dev, libx11-dev, libxext-dev, libxmu-dev, libxi-dev

Installed CRAN Packages

assertr, car, caret, classInt, crayon, DBI, data.table, devtools, doParallel, dplyr, ellipsis,
foreign, fs, generics, ggmap, ggplot2, ggpubr, ggvis, glmnet, glue, googleVis, haven, here,
htmlwidgets, httr, igraph, jagsUI, janitor, jsonlite, leafsync, librarian, lifecycle, lme4,
lubridate, lwgeom, magick, magrittr, maps, maptools, mapview, mgcv, multcomp, ncdf4,
ncdf4.helpers, nlme, odbc, pkgconfig, pillar, purrr, posterior, quantmod, R6, RColorBrewer,
Rcpp, RMySQL, RPostgreSQL, RSQLite, randomForest, raster, rgdal, rgeos, rgl, rJava, rjson,
rmarkdown, rnaturalearth, roxygen2, shiny, shinyWidgets, shinydashboard, sf, solaR, sp, splm,
stars, stringr, summarytools, survival, terra, testthat, tibble, tidymodels, tidyselect,
tidyverse, tidyr, TraMineR, units, vcd, vctrs, XLConnect, XML, xlsx, xtable, xts, zoo, ragg