GPU Remote Workstation Booking System

GPU Remote Workstation Service (Experimental)

 

We provide access to remote GPU workstations that you can use via your web browser.

The machines are equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER or 4090 GPUs and are available to reserve time on.

When you reserve time on one of these machines, a remote access session will be created for you, and you will have scratch space on the machine’s disk in /scratch0/$USER/

 

This scratch space and any other data on the disk will be removed when your sessions ends, so you must ensure that you save any work you want to keep in your home folder or project store.

 

Making a Booking

    1. Login to the booking system at https://mydesk.cs.ucl.ac.uk using your Computer Science account username and password. Email login is not supported.
    2. Click on the Reservations menu, then select Schedule to go to the view of all schedules.
    3. Click on the dropdown menu at the top of the page and select GPU Workstations.
    4. You can now click on a time slot for a machine to reserve it.
      • On the New Reservation page, enter a title then click the Create button.
    5. Once you have made a reservation, a remote access session will initiated for you on the machine at that specified time.

NOTE: It is not possible for the session to start if you make a reservation less than 10 minutes before the start of a time slot. Please book time slots that start at least 10 mins in the future.

Accessing Your Booked Machine

    1. At the time of your booking, in a web browser, go to the following URL modified for your reserved machine’s host name:
      https://<host>.cs.ucl.ac.uk:8443/guacamole
      • For example: https://blurr.cs.ucl.ac.uk:8443/guacamole
    2. Login to the Apache Guacamole remote session using your Computer Science username and password.
    3. You will see a desktop environment running Rocky Linux and your department home folder will be available.

 

Access From Non-CS Machines

If you are using a computer that is not managed by UCL Computer Science, then you will need our Root CA certificate to connect securely.

Download the following Root CA provided by UCL Computer Science and add this to your web browser:

UCL_Computer_Science_CAcert2018.pem

 

In Firefox
  1. Click the menu button, then click the Settings item.

  2. In Settings, use the menu on the left to go to Privacy & Security and
    scroll down to the Security section.

  3. Under Certificates click the View Certificates.. button.

  4. Click on the Authorities tab, then click the Import… button.

  5. Choose the UCL_Computer_Science_CAcert2018.pem file that you downloaded.

  6. Check the box to “Trust this CA to identify web sites.” and click OK

 

In Chrome
  1. Click the menu button, then click the Settings item.

  2. In Settings, use the menu on the left to go to Privacy and security and
    click the the Security section.

  3. Under Advanced click Manage certificates

  4. Click on the Authorities tab, then click the Import button.

  5. Choose the UCL_Computer_Science_CAcert2018.pem file that you downloaded.

  6. Check the box to “Trust this certificate for identifying websites” and click OK

 

Access From Outside the CS Network

If you are connecting from outside the UCL CS Network, you will need to use an SSH tunnel. In a terminal on Linux, run the following ssh command substituting the host name of the machine you booked, and your UCL CS username for $CS_USER

ssh -L 8081:<host>.cs.ucl.ac.uk:8443 $CS_USER@knuckles.cs.ucl.ac.uk

Once the above is running, you can visit https://localhost:8081/guacamole in your
browser to view the site.

 

Note: If you log out this will end your graphical session early!

If you need to, you can close your browser tab and open it again later.

 

Session End

Prior to your session ending, you will receive a warning to save any work you have on the machine to another location.

At the end of your reservation, your Apache Guacamole remote session will automatically terminate, and any data will be cleaned off the machine for the next user.