Running X11 Jobs

Submitting an Interactive Job

It is possible to run interactive jobs that allow X11 forwarding. This will enable you to use GUI program (such as Matlab or RStudio) on a compute node and do computationally intensive tasks. Previously, you could only use X11 on login nodes, and were limited to simple tasks such as editing or viewing results.

Firstly, you must login to MonARCH with X11 enabled.

ssh -XY username@monarch.erc.monash.edu

Once there you should create an interactive job with the --x11 flag. Please do not use smux and we do not think it will support this option. For example, to use the short partition.

srun --pty --partition=short --nodes=1 --x11 bash -intensive

This creates an interactive shell on a compute node. X11 should be enabled. i.e. echo $DISPLAY should produce a value, and running an X11 program should make it appear on your desktop. e.g.

xterm