Hi there, I’m a new OOD admin looking to understand how interactive shell/terminal jobs are handled via OOD. I’m using Grid Engine as my scheduling back-end and am looking for whatever analog there is to qlogin (srun in Slurm, I think). Out of the box it seems like OOD is geared for designing and submitting batch jobs or for launching a full graphical desktop via Interactive Apps → Desktop. Am I missing something here, or is there no ability to launch a shell on a cluster node by default? I’m aware that I can can launch a terminal in various places (e.g Clusters → $cluster Shell Access) but that just connects to whatever my login node is and not a compute node.
You are correct that the current flow with built-in apps is to launch an interactive desktop and access the terminal from there. That means that it is unlikely OOD will ever include a batch terminal app by default, but that doesn’t mean it is not worth trying to create if you would like it. I know @robinkar developed something like this, so its definitely possible, but I am not sure on the details of his approach.
We discussed this during GOOD26, but here is a recap in case someone else is interested as well.
At CSC, we have a Compute node shell app that launches tmux on a compute node as an interactive app. Then, the SSH wrapper (OOD_SSH_WRAPPER) does some logic to check whether the SSH target is a compute node with a compute node shell job running (sys/dashboard/sys/ood-persistent-ssh) and then tries to attach to the tmux session that is running there. In our case we SSH first to the login node and then run srun to run tmux attach on the compute node.
We use a ttyd based app to load bash, screen or tmux (also w/ trzsz) but there have recently been some challenges with it due to changes with basic auth - The ttyd not working in OOD 4.1.1
you might consider creating a VS Code interactive app for OOD. Once the connection to your VS Code session is established, you can open the VS Code terminal and work directly on the compute node where VS Code is running.