VNC: Difference between revisions

To connect to gra-vdi, start your desktop VNC viewer (tigervnc) and enter <code>VNC server: '''gra-vdi.alliancecan.ca'''</code>. This will bring up a login screen where you can enter your Alliance credentials.  A desktop session will then be started on either gra-vdi3 or gra-vdi4 using a round robin algorithm.

As an aside, to connect to either machine directly you could instead enter <code>VNC server: '''gra-vdi3.sharcnet.ca'''</code> or enter <code>VNC server: '''gra-vdi4.sharcnet.ca'''</code>.  This could be useful if either server is under a heavy load and your planning to run some intensive calculations or you want to use your local $SCRATCH directory on either server (which points to /local/tmp/$USER on each machine).  This is notably different than the clusters where $SCRATCH points to the shared directory /scratch/$USER location on all compute and login nodes.  Similar to the clusters however any data left under $SCRATCH on gra-vdi will eventually be deleted since the disc space is limited as it is fast.