High Performance Computing
Connecting to monsoon
The primary mechanism for connecting to Monsoon, submitting work, monitoring progress, and retrieving results is ssh. The ssh authentication mechanism is configured to leverage NAU’s LDAP service, so you don’t have to remember a separate username and password for Monsoon–it’s the same as your NAU credentials. If you don’t know what those are, contact ITS.
Since monsoon is not directly accessible from the internet, access to monsoon is only available via campus connections, or while connected to VPN
The following steps will walk you through how to set up ssh on your local desktop or laptop and connect to Research Computing for the first time.
Prerequisite: Obtain monsoon account
Linux and Mac OSX – openssh Accordion Closed
Connecting is simple. Just open a terminal and type the following:
$ ssh nauid@monsoon.hpc.nau.edu
Where “nauid” is your actual NAU userid (i.e., abc123). You will be prompted for your password. Once you’ve entered your credentials, you should be presented with a prompt on one of the login nodes “wind or rain”.
If you’re unfamiliar with how to use a Linux system, you may next want to read the document on Linux/Bash Basics.
X11-forwarding
If you’re going to be doing interactive graphical work, you will want to enable the forwarding of X11 windows. You can do this simply by specifying the `-Y` option, like so:
$ ssh -Y nauid@monsoon.hpc.nau.edu
On Mac OSX, in order for the forwarding of graphics to work, you must open ‘X11’ or XQuartz first. If you’re running XQuartz and are still having a problem getting X11 forwarding working, you may need to edit your /private/etc/ssh/sshd_config file and add the following line:
X11Forwarding yes
Windows – putty.exe Accordion Closed
Unlike Linux and Mac OSX, there is no in-built ssh client for Windows. You’ll need to download and install PuTTY.
Once you’ve installed PuTTY, open the program and where it prompts you for a “host”, enter ‘nauid@monsoon.hpc.nau.edu’. You may want to save the session for a handy shortcut later.
Click ‘connect’ and you should be prompted for your NAU user id and password.
Once you’ve entered your credentials, you should be presented with a prompt on one of the login nodes “wind or rain”.
If you’re unfamiliar with how to use a Linux system, you may next want to read the document on Linux/Bash Basics.
X11-forwarding
If you’re going to be doing interactive graphical work, you will want to enable the forwarding of X11 windows.
First, download and install Xming-mesa.
Once installed, you’ll need to make sure this program is running *before* you connect with `putty`. It is a background application and will only run with a little status icon in your system tray.
Once `Xming-mesa` is installed and running, open up `putty` again, but before connecting you’ll need to navigate to the menu item on the left side of the window and ‘enable X11 forwarding’ as shown in the picture below.
Once this is done, you can connect as before. You can test that X11 forwarding is working this works by connecting to Monsoon and running the command:
$ xeyes
If a pair of eyes appear on your desktop you’ve correctly configured X11 forwarding.
Now that you’ve completed reading this section, you’ll probably be interested in File Management – Getting your files to and from Monsoon or Linux/Bash Basics.