Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The Department of Energy's largest science and energy lab with the world's most powerful neutron source, Oak Ridge National Laboratory provides researchers around the world remote access to one-of-a-kind scientific resources with NoMachine NX.

NoMachine NX enables Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers and collaborators to run extensive engineering analysis remotely.

About the Company

The Department of Energy's largest science and energy lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), is a multi-program science and technology lab managed for the US Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. With the world's most powerful neutron source, ORNL is the foremost center for neutron science research around the globe.

Scientists and engineers at ORNL conduct research and development to create technological solutions that strengthen the nation's leadership in key areas of science, increase the availability of clean, abundant energy, restore and protect the environment and contribute to national security. ORNL has an annual funding that exceeds $1.4 billion, employs a staff of more than 4,300 and annually hosts approximately 3,000 guest researchers who spend two weeks or longer in Oak Ridge.

The Challenge

ORNL needed to provide guest researchers and university students remote access to Linux applications stored centrally on their on-site servers, thus reducing the need to travel and stay in Oak Ridge. Research is then possible to perform with the remote availability to ORNL's resources.

In addition, the remote access solution had to include enhanced security through SSH encryption which protects ORNL resources and information. The speed and the ability to handle programs using heavy 3D graphics were also highly desirable. Often researchers need to run heavy engineering analysis and simulation programs for days or weeks. The output from these programs is normally viewed at the hosted desktop, but a remote viewing station, or client, would enable an improved application delivery solution.

The Solution

As a result of these needs, NoMachine NX was chosen for a much-improved remote access solution for ORNL's background intensive environment. Previously using Cygwin, ORNL ran Linux applications on top of Windows, leaving a large footprint on the remote computer and slowing down the research process. NoMachine NX provides groups of ORNL employees, guest researchers and students from around the world seamless remote access to Linux-based applications, reducing the footprint on the local machine and allowing them to perform heavy engineering analysis more efficiently.

NoMachine NX also meets the security requirements through SSH encryption and enables ORNL to set up necessary security steps like a controlled password system and one time password tokens for outside users. Once connected to the environment, analysis is performed using 3D images and NX's support of OpenGL allows researchers to rotate objects and visualize complex graphic results. Extensive analysis runs for days or weeks and can be easily monitored and edited with the suspend and resume feature of NX.

Results

ORNL deploys NX Enterprise Server on several server clusters; four servers located at a single site, and a fifth, larger cluster located at another a couple miles away in a super computer facility utilizing a nine-node cluster. NX empowers far and wide connections to their computing infrastructure giving researchers, students and employees the flexibility to access ORNL resources remotely from around the world, reducing travel costs and helping to avoid delay in research projects. The unique speed, compression and caching features of NX provide end users with a real-time remote experience, just as if they were on the local machine.

Senior researcher James Freels said, "NX plays a major communication role in the analysis process at ORNL allowing researchers to work in real-time from any location, while providing the security we demand with SSH encryption."

About NoMachine NX Enterprise Server

A fully-featured Unix terminal server and desktop consolidation tool allowing users to create, manage and operate an unlimited number of virtual desktop sessions on a single server. Perfect for companies which need to offer a complete set of corporate services to all mobile and on-site employees.