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Use a Managed Cluster

Use this guide to open terminals and sessions, run workflows, submit scheduler jobs, and understand the managed-cluster status shown in ACTIVATE.

For organization administrators

Before handing the cluster to users, provide its ACTIVATE name, the user's Login, Sudo, or Admin access level, the expected login route, and the site's scheduler, session, and support policies.

Open a Terminal

Select Open Terminal from the cluster page to connect to the configured login address. The SSH username is your ACTIVATE username.

From a local terminal with the authenticated ACTIVATE CLI, run:

pw ssh <cluster-name>

The explicit managed-cluster form is also supported:

pw ssh pw://<cluster-name>

See pw ssh for port forwarding and ProxyCommand examples.

When the login address is a registered node with a live tunnel, ACTIVATE carries SSH through that tunnel. If the node is offline or its tunnel is unavailable, ACTIVATE may attempt a direct connection to the selected node's hostname. Ask your administrator which path is expected; a registered-node selection does not guarantee tunnel-only access.

Start a Desktop or VS Code Session

An organization administrator must first select a tunnel-connected Session Node. It can differ from the login node.

Use Quick Launch on the cluster's Details tab, or create a session from Sessions. A session remains assigned to the node selected when it was created even if the cluster's Session Node setting changes later.

  • Follow Desktop Sessions for a browser-based graphical desktop on the selected session node.
  • Follow VS Code Sessions for browser VS Code or a local VS Code Remote-SSH connection.
  • Use an interactive session when you need a scheduler-allocated compute node rather than the configured session node.

Sessions cannot start while the selected node's agent tunnel is disconnected. Check the node's tunnel state or contact the cluster administrator if a session remains pending or fails.

Run Workflows and Submit Jobs

Users with cluster access can select the managed cluster as a workflow compute resource. See Running Workflows.

You can also open a terminal and submit jobs using the site's scheduler commands. For Slurm examples, see Submitting Jobs via Slurm. Follow your Linux administrator's instructions for partitions, queues, accounts, storage, and software modules.

Understand What ACTIVATE Displays

  • Details summarizes online nodes, CPU, memory, storage, current and historical utilization, and active sessions. It also displays partitions for a detected Slurm controller.
  • Jobs lists active Slurm or PBS jobs. Slurm jobs can be filtered by partition.
  • Nodes shows each registered node's status, type, operating system, agent version, tunnel state, and last heartbeat.
  • A node detail page shows CPU, memory, disk, load, uptime, process count, network totals, IP addresses, filesystems, and metric history.

ACTIVATE reports scheduler data only from the registered node where it detects slurmctld or pbs_server. PBS jobs appear, but PBS partitions are not reported.

Access Problems

If you cannot sign in:

  1. Confirm you have Login, Sudo, or Admin access to the cluster.
  2. Confirm your ACTIVATE username is the Linux username expected by the site.
  3. If the site uses ACTIVATE SSH keys, confirm your public key under Account > Authentication > SSH Keys.
  4. Tell the administrator whether browser terminal, pw ssh, or both fail and whether the selected login node appears online.

Administrators can continue with operations and troubleshooting.