About Research Desktop (RED) at IU

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Overview

Research Desktop (RED) is a graphical desktop service for users with accounts on the Quartz research supercomputer at Indiana University. UITS developed RED to be particularly helpful to users who are unaccustomed to working in Unix-like command-line environments. Most research supercomputers, including those at IU, run Unix-like operating systems that, by default, require you to type commands into a command processor, or shell. If you are accustomed to working only with graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as those in Windows and macOS, learning how to effectively use a Unix-like, command-line interface can be a challenge (or even an impediment to your research). RED helps reduce the learning curve for users with little or no command-line experience and, as a result, promotes broader use of IU's research cyberinfrastructure.

RED lets you use a graphical user interface (GUI) running on your personal device to launch and control a session running on one of more than two dozen dedicated nodes, each equipped with either two 8-core or two 12-core Intel Xeon processors and 256 GB of RAM. Each user is, however, limited to a usage maximum of 100 GB. From the RED GUI, you can run graphical applications remotely without noticeable latency and without needing to submit an interactive compute job.

Watch a brief video about RED.

From RED, you can access your home directory space on IU's research supercomputers and your space on Slate, Slate-Project, or Slate-Scratch. Advanced options let you export local resources to your RED session, enabling data transfers between your personal device and your research computing accounts. Secure shell (SSH) encryption is used to protect data traffic between your personal device and your RED session.

Access RED

To use Research Desktop (RED), you need the following:

Once you have an account on Quartz and a device enrolled in IU's Two-Step Login (Duo), you can use the ThinLinc Client remote desktop application to access RED. For instructions, see Download, install, and configure ThinLinc Client to use Research Desktop (RED) at IU.

Alternatively, you can use a web browser to access https://red.uits.iu.edu.

If prompted, log in with your IU username and passphrase.

Note:
  • SSH public-key authentication (PKA) is supported for connections made with the ThinLinc Client. (The web interface does not support SSH PKA.) For help with SSH key pairs, see Set up SSH public key authentication to connect to a remote system.
  • To access files on your personal device from within your RED session, you must connect using the ThinLinc Client remote desktop application. (The web interface does not support exporting local drives and directories.)
  • You cannot use a terminal client to SSH directly to any of RED's dedicated nodes.

Get help

If you are using Research Desktop (RED) and need help or have questions, use this form to contact the Research Desktop development team directly.

Related documents

Troubleshoot Research Desktop Help for Two-Step Login (Duo)

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Last modified on 2024-04-10 09:31:49.