Although you should always run analyses via the job scheduler, there are times when you may need to develop parts of it interactively at the command-line prompt. For instance, you may need to install some software, a few R packages, or run some quick tests on your new pipeline. C4 provides development nodes dedicated for such short-term usages and that are configured similarly to the compute nodes.
Please do not run your real-world analysis on the development nodes. Instead run it as a job via the scheduler - this will ensure that your analysis runs as fast as possible and with all the resources it needs. For further instruction, see the getting-started page Submit Job to Cluster.
Any shell session that has been idle for more than 24 hours will timeout and exit automatically.
To access one of the development node, say, c4-dev1,
make sure you are logged in to the cluster, and
type ssh c4-dev1 and press ENTER.
From one of the login nodes, do:
[alice@c4-log1 ~]$ ssh c4-dev1
alice@c4-dev1:s password: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[alice@c4-dev1 ~]$
As from the login nodes, it is possible to submit jobs also from the development nodes.