GUI Programs
The module gui/2 is no longer available. Use this page to know how to use GUI applications on Hipergator.
Here you will find the information necessary to configure and run graphical user interface (GUI) applications on HiPerGator. The process is not complicated, but running a GUI on a remote server and displaying the windows on your local client computer with a sufficiently responsive interface is not as easy as simply running the application locally. We'd like to acknowledge an Open Source Xpra Project for creating software we built our GUI sessions on top of.
X11 Forwarding
For the simplest case of running a lightweight GUI application for a very short time you can log into HiPerGator with
ssh -Y MYUSER@hpg.rc.ufl.edu
load the environment module your application is in and run it. Do not analyze data this way, but running a text editor, a web browser to log in and get an api token from a remote service or some other very short and lightweight operations are fine.
Open OnDemand
Normally the X11 DISPLAY variable is set once the X11 server is started. This can be done manually, as described above, but an easier method is to use Open OnDemand since that will start an X11 server and allocate the frame buffer automatically.
Open OnDemand provides a web-only interface to starting and attaching to GUI programs with seamless connections through web browsers. This service is available at the following URL:
Using Open on Demand on HiPerGator
[5 min, 11 sec]
This video covers the use of Open on Demand https://openondemand.org/ on HiPerGator via https://ood.rc.ufl.edu/.
- Connect to https://ood.rc.ufl.edu/
- Launch a terminal
- Launch many graphical applications like Rstudio, Matlab and Freeview
- Manage job submission
- Upload, download and edit files via your browser