The "Université de Limoges" is one of the newest and most modern universities in France. A top research center, welcoming more than 700 researchers in notably recognized specialties around the world, the multi-site campus of Limoges offers training courses and a range of science degrees in a variety of disciplines from hard and life sciences, to human and social sciences.

Limoges' geographically dispersed researchers needed access to the scientific computing programs available on their high performance computing (HPC) cluster at the University's main campus. The IT service hired to perform the task of selecting, installing, and configuring the computing cluster environment wanted to choose a solution that would make remote access easy for the end user. Traditionally, accessing an environment or cluster is done through a remote terminal session with SSH encryption, but this IT service company wanted to offer a solution that would be easier for users accustomed to the Windows environment (but still supported SSH encryption). They also wanted to offer access to not only the computing resources, but also to post and pretreatment software.

Limoges first heard of NoMachine NX in 2005 in the "JRES" meeting attracting over 1000 technical staff and IT managers from all French universities. They heard of other Universities, present there, already using NX and were impressed with the results they heard it produced, and decided it would be ideal for their situation. For starters, NX supported industry standard SSH encryption, while providing the user access to a full graphical desktop and allowing access to the post and pretreatment software based on visualization tools. NX works very well on a DSL line using small network bandwidth. It also made server access easy; all users needed to access the Limoges computing cluster was the NX Client, which could be made available on any machine. Providing mobile access from any location, NoMachine NX allows researchers to work from home or other locations, accomplishing more without the need to be on site at the university. Now Limoges users can connect to the resources and applications they need from anywhere.

As far as session speed, session resiliency, and reliability, NX offered the best on the market. NX was able to offer Limoges a much faster, reliable, and real-time remote access connection than competing solutions.

With its easy installment, NoMachine NX has made accessing Linux environments from machines running Windows and Linux easy and comfortable for users as well as administrators. Users can use NX to access the Linux NX Server from Windows environments, thus simplifying batch submission, and accessing scientific software applications such as Matlab, Fluent, and other powerful virtualization tools. Due to the session resiliency feature, in case of temporary network failure users can reconnect with no data loss, protecting information and eliminating the need to repeat research.

System Administrator, Xavier Montagutelli, says, "NX has proven to be the best, most cost effective remote access solution for widely spread users accessing the University's computing infrastructure environment and resources through Windows and Linux. It provides secure mobile connectivity from anywhere, is very reliable, and offers unmatched session resiliency."

Scientific software
Batch Submission

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