Terminal Interface on Windows

Getting ready to login

Before you can log in with SSH to a VSC cluster, you need to generate a pair of SSH keys and upload them to your VSC account. There are multiple ways to create your keys in Windows, please check our documentation on Generating keys on Windows.

Connecting to the cluster

There are multiple solutions on Windows that provide a Secure Shell (SSH) client to connect to remote machines. You need to have such a tool to connect to the login nodes of our HPC clusters. The following are the main options supported by VSC.

PuTTY

PuTTY is a simple-to-use and freely available GUI SSH client for Windows that is easy to set up.

• Terminal using PuTTY
  • Prerequisite
  • Installation
  • Connecting to VSC clusters
  • Managing SSH keys with Pageant
  • Proxies and network tunnels to compute nodes
  • Troubleshooting PuTTY connection issues

MobaXterm

MobaXterm is a free and easy to use SSH client for Windows that has text-mode, a graphical file browser, an X server, an SSH agent, and more, all in one. Installation is very simple when using its Portable edition.

• Terminal using MobaXterm
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
  • Setup a remote session
  • Import PuTTY sessions
  • Copying files to/from the cluster
  • Setup an SSH agent
  • Troubleshooting MobaXterm connection issues

Windows PowerShell

Recent versions of Windows come with OpenSSH installed. This means that you can use it from PowerShell or the Windows Command Prompt as you would in the terminal of a Linux system. All information about SSH and data transfer on the Linux client pages apply to OpenSSH on Windows in the same way.

WSL2

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) can be an alternative if you are using Windows 10 build 1607 or later. This solution allows to install a Linux distribution on your Windows computer and use SSH from within it. Hence, you can refer to all our documentation about SSH and data transfer found in the Linux client section.

• Installing WSL2 on windows