Access to ARC2

Once you have obtained an account on ARC2, you need to access the facility remotely from your workstation or laptop. Access to ARC2 is restricted to workstations/laptops on the Leeds University campus and network. If working from off-campus, you will need to connect to the University's VPN first, look at http://it.leeds.ac.uk/info/103/vpn for details on how to do this. Other sites/facilities will have similar arrangements with regards to access.

As mentioned before, HPC systems are predominantly Linux/Unix based systems. As such the most common method for access is via the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. SSH provides a secure and encrypted connection through which you can have interactive logins to and from remote machines. It also allows tunnelling of other ports, allowing X11 connections for example. It also provides tools for securely copying files to/from the remote machine.
The default shell on ARC2 is Bash, https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/bash.html.

Software requirements

Depending on your workstation’s or laptop’s OS, there are several pieces of software required to access and use ARC2. These are:

• Secure Shell (SSH) client (required) - Provides a secure and encrypted connection through which you can have interactive logins to and from remote machines. Includes a secure file copy utility.
• X11 server (optional) - Allows display of X-windows graphics, i.e. run graphical interfaces on ARC2 and have them displayed on your local workstation/laptop.
• File transfer client (optional) - Provides a graphical interface for transferring files to and from remote machines.