About SDSU OnDemand
SDSU OnDemand is a HPC web-based portal built with our University’s research community in mind. OnDemand integrates with our clusters, Innovator and Discovery, and offers features such as job submission, job monitoring, shell access, and interactive graphical sessions and apps all from within a web browser. SDSU's OnDemand web portals are built from Open OnDemand, an NSF-funded open-source project maintained and developed by the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC).
OnDemand is supported on all operating systems and browsers. Although not officially supported at this time, OnDemand is accessible via mobile as well.
Logging In
To access OnDemand, visit the following links:
Innovator Cluster: https://ondemand.sdstate.edu
Discovery Cluster: https://mydiscovery.sdstate.edu
And log in with the email address and password associated with your cluster account. You must have cluster access in order to use SDSU OnDemand. Please contact us if you do not have access.
Using OnDemand
OnDemand’s Files menu allows access to your /home directory on Innovator or Discovery. The web-based file explorer allows you to remotely interact with your files. You can create files and folders, view files, change file locations, upload files, and download files. You can also show dotfiles (hidden files) and file permissions.
The Active Jobs menu shows all jobs you currently have running on Innovator or Discovery and their status (completed, running). You can view your own jobs, or all jobs running on the cluster, using the dropdowns to filter your search.
The Clusters menu allows you to open a web-based terminal that connects you through an SSH session to the login node on Innovator or Discovery. OnDemand offers SSH access to each cluster within your browser. No SSH client is required to access the cluster.
Interactive Applications
There are Interactive Apps available for use on the cluster with OnDemand. The interactive apps menu provides direct web access to interactive applications on the cluster’s worker nodes without the need to edit job scripts.
We will use JupyterLab as an example.
When selecting JupyterLab as an interactive app, you are able to choose options for launching your JupyterLab application on the cluster. You can select options such as compute, bigmem, quickq, or GPU for the type of node you would like your application to run on. There are other options such as the number of cores, hours, and nodes for your job.
Note: When selecting options for your job, please follow the guidelines on the Interactive Apps page for maximum cores, nodes, etc. Any erroneous entries may cause your session to fail to start.
Below is an example of an Interactive App form on OnDemand.
Once you have launched your application, your session will be set up on the cluster. Depending on how busy the cluster is and how many resources you request, your session may be in queue for several minutes until the cluster can accommodate your request.
You will see this window as your application loads:
And when it is ready:
Select "Connect to Jupyter" to begin your session.
More applications are being developed for use with OnDemand. Please reach out to us if you would like any additional applications added, or if you have any questions about OnDemand in general.