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| About the University |
| The Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE) is a research lab with a particle accelerator, located in Wilson Laboratory on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY. CLASSE studies beams and accelerators, photon science, particle physics, and the early universe, serving thousands of collaborators and users including students and scientists from around the world. CLASSE also runs the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) X-ray user facility, used by researchers to examine the structure and function of our material world, with an eye towards designing new materials, solving technological problems, and even curing diseases. |
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| The Challenge |
| In response to the COVID pandemic, CLASSE was forced to migrate to 100% remote operations for their CHESS user facility. The vast majority of the technical staff at CLASSE such as engineers, software developers and physicists were also operating entirely from home. All activity typically done on-premise at a physical computer suddenly had to be supported remotely either through interacting with the physical display or through virtual desktops. This meant being able to access and interact with everything, from standard office applications such as email, web browsing and text editing to software development programs, and complex scientific and engineering applications like CAD, matlab, mathematica and similar.
Additionally, the research facility had to guarantee access to the seven beamlines from remote CHESS users which would be interacting with their experiments. Users who typically travel from all over the world to perform research physically at CHESS would be able to log in remotely and study samples from their home institutions. The department therefore needed a remote access solution that would be able to handle hundreds of simultaneous connection requests to graphically-intensive applications running on workstations and servers on-site. It was also essential that the remote desktop experience to those programs was seamless, meaning that users would be able to conduct their research activity regardless of the operating system they were connecting from and their location.
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| The Solution |
| CHESS chose NoMachine Cloud Server to centralize user access to on-premise computers running NoMachine Workstation for Linux, NoMachine Terminal Server for Linux, and Enterprise Desktop for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. The NoMachine Cloud Server functions as a unified access point to all of CHESS’ resources inside their network, effectively forwarding user connection requests to workstation and desktop nodes according to permissions and profiles pre-established by the administrator. NoMachine Workstation provides seamless remote access to a personal Linux workspace, permitting multiple virtual desktops to run on a Linux server, therefore enabling users to conduct separate simultaneous test sessions on the same host if needed. Meanwhile, NoMachine Terminal Server extends the virtual desktop support and functions as a central login node for submitting remote compute jobs to the CLASSE compute farm. NoMachine Enterprise Desktop enables remote access to any Mac, Windows and Linux computer, facilitating a work-from-home scenario where staff or students need access to applications and important files back at the office, or for setting up permanent access to an unattended computer.
In addition, the new inverse connection support in the v8 release allows CLASSE IT staff to remotely connect to and manage mobile desktops and workstations that travel offsite and switch between experimental subnets when onsite. This has been crucial to enabling NoMachine to act as as a single remote access and support solution for accessing the physical display on all laptops, desktops, workstations, and servers managed by the CLASSE IT group.
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| Results |
| NoMachine has been instrumental in recreating the entire on-site experience for CHESS users and CLASSE staff. As written in a news article on the CHESS blog, "all seven CHESS beamlines are equipped with remote access via NoMachine, a user-friendly interface to allow quick remote access to a station computer. During multiple stress tests by the IT, scientific and operations teams, remote access proved to be just as seamless as sitting in the lab. As lightsources around the world are impacted by the pandemic - either closed to users or partially reopening - this current experimental run for CHESS has garnered a lot of interest from users, with more proposals and beamtime requests than previous years," says Devin Bougie, IT Manager at Cornell University. |
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| Networking Environment |
Key Benefits |
Applications Delivered |
NoMachine Cloud Server for Linux
NoMachine Enterprise Desktop for Mac/Win/Linux
NoMachine Workstation for Linux
NoMachine Terminal Server for Linux
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Fast remote access
Seamless experience
A user-friendly interface
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CAD programs
Mathematica
Matlab
Office applications
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| About NoMachine Cloud Server Products |
| Cloud Server Products bridge the gap between physical and virtual resources scattered across corporate networks by converging heterogeneous environments running on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix workstations. Cloud Server is the gateway to your entire desktop and server infrastructure efficiently routing users to the requested resource. |
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| About NoMachine Enterprise Desktop Products |
| Remote desktop for business professionals and teams. Access any computer as if you're sitting in front of it, including from any HTML-enabled browser. Perfect for remote collaboration or help desk activities, these desktops can be standalone or combined with NoMachine Cloud Server. By adding them to Cloud Server you can centralize access to all your resources via a single gateway, securely and reliably, through a consistent user interface on all operating systems. |
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