Access the cluster

There are three ways to access the cluster: web portal, SSH, and CLI client. This article will cover how they authenticate users.

Web portal

You should be able to log in to the web portal https://oasishpc.hk using the provided username and password.

If this is your first-time login, the system will ask you to set up your second factor for authentication. Please install the Google Authenticator app, and follow the instruction to set that up.

Currently, we don't have a forgot password mechanism. Please get in touch with your administrator for support if you have forgotten your login password.

The cluster is integrated with The Hong Kong Access Federation (HKAF). So if you have an HKAF account, click "login through HKAF" to log in. Extra two-factor authentication is not required.

SSH

You may SSH directly into our cluster at ssh.oasishpc.hk:22 through the SSH servers farm. Our load balancer will connect you to the server with the least connections. We only grant connections by a private key. You may download your private key from the web portal. Please keep your private key safe and don't share it with others.

You will have 8 shared CPU cores and 8GB of memory to prepare your software, job script, and data. If you need more resources on the login node, please submit a ticket and let us help.

If your login name is hpcuser123, you can log in by using this command line:

# download your SSH key from the web portal home page
# assume it is named your-key.pem

# protect your key to not be read or write by others
chmod 400 your-key.pem

# ssh with your login name and the key
ssh -i your-key.pem [email protected]

When you download a new key from the web portal, the previous one you downloaded will be deactivated.

You may also access the file system with your favorite SFTP client.

CLI client

If you find it tedious to keep the private key, you may leverage the CLI client for keyless login. First, follow the web portal's instructions to install and configure the CLI client on your local computer. Then execute the following command to SSH without a key.

hc connect

The client supports file sets mounting like with the below command. We will cover the details in a later chapter.

hc filesystem-mount -t home -m /mnt/hpc-home

Currently, both sub-commands support Linux and Mac OSX only. Windows is not supported.