HBSGrid accounts are available to HBS faculty, research associates, and doctoral students. Please fill out the HBSGrid Account Request Form to set up your account.

Temporary guest accounts on the HBSGrid are available for HBS faculty members' collaborators. These are granted on a 12-month basis and may be renewed as necessary. Collaborators should work with HBS Faculty and RCS staff to submit the necessary documentation for the account request. Please see the Requesting an HBSGrid Account page for details.

If you will be using compute resources on the cluster, please sign up for HBSGrid training once your account has been created. Our training materials are also available to view online for reference.

Use a VPN When Necessary

A VPN ensures that all communication between your computer and grid resources are encrypted, especially when using a public wireless network.

Connecting to the HBS VPN is necessary under the following conditions: 

• Any off-campus connections
• On-HBS-campus connections that are not through HBS Secure wireless or a wired ethernet

HBS-issued desktops and laptops have the necessary software pre-installed. Collaborators or individuals who need to re-install the software can see our Logging In page for details. For a useful step-by-step list of instructions for connecting to the VPN, see the VPN Quick Reference Guide.

Connecting to the HBSGrid

You can connect to the HBSGrid using a Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) or by entering UNIX commands via terminal.

GUI

NoMachine is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) client on the HBSGrid. NoMachine allows users to utilize Grid software, RAM, and processor resources as though they were working on a desktop (e.g., Stata on the HBSGrid looks like the desktop version of Stata). Unix/Linux knowledge is not needed. To get started using a GUI on the HBSGrid, please see details on the Logging In page. For tips on customizing your NoMachine interface (e.g., changing screen size), please see our Quick Tips to NoMachine Interface Improvements.

Terminal

For terminal (SSH) sessions to the HBSGrid, initiate your SSH session with your Grid username to the hostname researchgrid.hbs.edu with the appropriate terminal client (e.g. 'ssh jharvard@hbsgrid.hbs.edu'). We recommend Terminal for Mac, and SecureCRT for Windows machines. Guest collaborators can download Putty to gain terminal access to the HBS grid. See our Logging In page for more details on ways to connect to Grid resources. 

Once an account is created for you on the HBSGrid, your home directory will be located at /export/home/<group>/<username> (e.g., /export/home/faculty/jharvard) to store things like your configuration files and custom scripts. Your home directory can only be accessed by you and has a storage quota, the size of which is determined by your group (e.g., doctoral, RA, or faculty). Please note that level 4 data cannot be stored on your home directory.

If you are working on a project with one or more persons, a group project space can be created or may already exist for your work. The path for project spaces is /export/projects/<projectname>. We encourage the use of project spaces over home folders because they are accessible by all persons on a project (home folders are not) and the storage quota is much larger.

Please do not use HBSGrid storage to back up your files. Please see Research Storage for more details.

You can transfer data to your home folder or project spaces via three methods:

• using GUI client,
• mapping/mounting a shared drive, or
• by terminal commands.

A graphical tool like FileZilla is available cross-platform for Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows. Windows users who prefer SCP can download it from the company's website.

There are two different ways of doing work (running a job) on the HBSGrid:

1. If you are logged in via the NoMachine GUI, you can run jobs interactively using packages in the Applications menu, or
2. Open a terminal window to use the command line for more flexibility and/or if you anticipate running several jobs at once. For terminal users, the command-line can be used to submit batch jobs and initiate interactive sessions using X-windows. For example, you can run an interactive R job using: bsub -q short_int -Is R
Bsub (batch submission) is the top-level command used to run applications on powerful remote machines. -q short_int means you want to run on the short interactive queue. -Is means we are running an interactive shell. The rest of the command (R in this case) indicates that you'd like to run R on the remote machine . For additional information on how to submit batch jobs, please see our Running a Program/Submitting a Job page.

We ask that you choose your resources and memory footprint appropriately. Please close your sessions when you are not running jobs.

The HBSGrid offers several commonly used software packages including R, Stata, MATLAB, Mathematica, SAS, Stat/Transfer, and more. For information on what software is available on the HBSGrid, please see our Software page.

You may need to install other software packages on the HBSGrid; for guidance, please see the section on Installing Software on the HBSGrid page.