How-To Run an X11 Application

A wrapper script has been created to run X11 applications, called idev (interactive-development), or nicknamed xrun.  This has been installed into /usr/local/bin on login and compute nodes.

To use it, do the following steps:

1. Install an X11 server on your desktop or laptop, e.g. “Xming” on Windows, or “XQuartz” on MacOS.
2. SSH to one of the Talapas login nodes (talapas-ln1.uoregon.edu) with X11 forwarding enabled:
   • If using the Putty SSH client on Windows, make sure that the X11 forwarding box is checked.
   • If using MacOS or Linux, connect using ssh -Y
3. Once on a Talapas login node, you have two options available, xrun or srun.
   • DEPRECATED: Using xrun, you can pass many of the same arguments to xrun as you can to srun.
   • Using srun, use the --x11 flag (available in the Slurm 17.11 module)
4. Launch your X11 application, e.g. type xclock

# I believe this is deprecated.  Use srun instead.
xrun -N1 -n1 --time=02:00:00

# This is the more up-to-date command to run.
srun -A hpcrcf -N1 -n1 --time=02:00:00 --x11 --pty bash -i