Research Desktop (RED) is a graphical desktop service for users with accounts on the Carbonate research supercomputer at Indiana University. UITS developed RED to be particularly helpful to users who are unaccustomed to working in Unix-like command-line environments. Most research supercomputers, including those at IU, run Unix-like operating systems that, by default, require you to type commands into a command processor, or shell. If you are accustomed to working only with graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as those in Windows and macOS, learning how to effectively use a Unix-like, command-line interface can be a challenge (or even an impediment to your research). RED helps reduce the learning curve for users with little or no command-line experience and, as a result, promotes broader use of IU's research cyberinfrastructure.
RED lets you use a graphical user interface (GUI) running on your personal device to launch and control a session running on one of more than two dozen dedicated nodes, each equipped with either two 8-core or two 12-core Intel Xeon processors and 256 GB of RAM. From the RED GUI, you can run graphical applications remotely without noticeable latency and without needing to submit an interactive compute job.