Connecting to the Linux Cluster

• SSH

SSH, or secure shell, is a protocol to establish an encrypted connection to a device over a network. If you are confident enough in your command line prowess, you are able to connect to the cluster via SSH using your wustl key. There are many SSH clients available (even on your phone), but the simplest way to use it is just through your desktop's command line interface (powershell or CMD on Windows, or terminal on Mac). On any of these programs, the command is the same.

ssh wustlusername@ssh.engr.wustl.edu

It will prompt you for your wustl key password and you should be able to access it.

For some classes, we also have linux lab servers set up. The url for this is linuxlab00#.seas.wustl.edu where "#" is any number 1-8.

• OOD

While accessing the server via ssh provides the most flexibility in setting up your own containers and configuring your environment for your research project, the quickest way to get access to the cluster is with the Open On Demand interface. You can login to this with your WUSTL key and you will have several pre-made options to set up jobs and open interactive sessions with a Jupyter notebook or VSCode session. The documentation for specific instances of the OOD interface can be found at compute.engr.wustl.edu. And while it is possible to use these without knowing any linux commands, these all include a linux shell where you can customize your environment, so it is still worthwhile to know some commands to make full use of these programs.

For instance, let's start a Jupyter notebook and