X11

This tutorial is still a work in progress and should only be used by expert users.

If you want to display things from the DSI cluster on your local machine (ie open images, run a program that requires a GUI, etc.) you will need to set up X11 forwarding.

1. First, you will need to update your ~/.ssh/config file. Assuming you have followed the previous instructions for setting up your config file, you should have something like this:

Host fe.ds*
  HostName fe01.ds.uchicago.edu
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/PRIVATE_KEY
  ForwardAgent yes
  User CNET_ID
  # add the below lines for X11 forwarding
  ForwardX11 yes  # for flag -X
  ForwardX11Trusted yes # for flag -Y, not necessary

1. Log in to the cluster using ssh fe.ds
2. Request a compute node (you don’t need a GPU) - something like this will work: srun -p general -t 6:00:00 --mem=8GB --pty /bin/bash
3. Sign into your compute node in a new terminal window with the -X flag. So, if you are assigned node i001, your command will be: ssh -X i001.ds
4. To check that you have X11 forwarding working, run: echo $DISPLAY You should get something like: localhost:10.0
5. You may also need to install XQuartz on your local machine
6. To view an image, use Eye of GNOME: eog /path/to/img.jpeg

Last update: October 2023