VSCode on Triton¶

VSCode is available through Open OnDemand. If you want to connect through your own computer, read below.

“Remote SSH” is a nice way to work on a remote computer, but on Triton, that will run everything on the login node. For light use this is OK, but for heavy calculations it should be avoided, since it will affect other login node usage.

VSCode remote SSH host directly to interactive job¶

Sometimes you want more resources than the login node. This section presents a way to have VSCode directly connect to a job resource allocation on Triton - so you can do larger calculations / use more memory / etc. without interfering with others. Note that for real production calculations, you should use Serial Jobs, and not run stuff through your editor, since everything gets lost when your connection dies.

This section contains original research and may not fully work, and may only work on Linux/Mac right now.

In you ~/.ssh/config, add this block to define a server triton-vscode. For more information .ssh/config, including what these mean and what else you might need in here, see SSH:

Host triton-vscode
    ProxyCommand ssh triton /share/apps/ssh-node-proxycommand --partition=interactive --time=1:00:00
    StrictHostKeyChecking no
    UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
    User USERNAME

# You also need a triton alias here:

Host triton
    HostName triton.aalto.fi
    # ... any other thing you need for connecting to triton.
    User USERNAME

Now, with VSCode’s Remote SSH, you can select the triton-vscode remote. It will ssh to Triton, request a job, and then directly connect to the job. Configure the job requirements in the ProxyCommand line (see Job submission - you can have multiple Host sections for different types of requirements).

Possible issues which may affect usage:

If the ssh connection dies, the background job will be terminated. You will lose your state and not be able to save.q
If the job dies due to time or memory exceeded, the same as above will happen: your job will die and there is no time to save.
If you request a GPU node or other high resources, this is reserved the whole time even if you aren’t using them. Consider this before reserving large resources (unless you close the jobs soon), or you might get an email from us asking about resource usage.