Research Computing on Engaging with VSCode

Engaging is a high-performance computing cluster managed by MIT's Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) which is freely available to the MIT community. Similar to Luria, Engaging uses the Slurm scheduler for submitting jobs and has environment modules, Conda, and container support. Using Engaging should be highly familiar to anyone with experience using Luria.

Engaging is a modern cluster compared to Luria, which affords it some extra quality-of-life features. This documentation will discuss two of those features:

1. The Engaging OnDemand platform for using the cluster resources straight from your browser instead of exclusively over the terminal.

2. The ability to connect to Engaging from Visual Studio Code (VSCode), allowing you to use a modern text editing program to edit your files on Engaging.

While Engaging and Luria are similar, there are slight differences for achieving the same goal.

	Luria	Engaging
Start an interactive session on a compute node	srun --pty bash	salloc
Use Conda	module load miniconda3/v4 /home/software/conda/miniconda3/bin/condainit	module load miniforge
Use containers	module load singularity/3.10.3 singularity run docker://hello-world	module load apptainer apptainer run docker://hello-world