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Your Desktop

Signing in

Go to https://<your-elab-address>/portal and sign in with your eLab account. The portal is where you start, stop, and schedule desktops and see your remaining hours.

Starting a desktop

  1. Choose a desktop type: CPU (general analysis) or GPU (deep learning and other GPU-accelerated work), and an image where more than one is offered.
  2. Click Launch. A CPU desktop is usually ready in a couple of minutes. A GPU desktop can take around ten minutes from cold — the platform is provisioning dedicated GPU hardware for you.
  3. When it's ready, the desktop opens in your browser tab.

One desktop runs at a time. Stop it from the portal when you finish — hours are counted while the desktop runs, whether or not you are connected.

Schedule a start

You can schedule a desktop to start at a set time (for example, before a morning workshop) so it's warm when you arrive. Scheduled hours count against your quota from the scheduled start, connected or not.

Your hours and budget

Desktop time draws on your project's budget. The portal shows your remaining CPU and GPU hours; when the project's budget is exhausted, desktops can no longer be started.

Your files

  • Home directory — your personal working space. It persists across desktop sessions and restarts; anything you leave there will be waiting next time.
  • /shared-ro — shared read-only content delivered into the environment (approved data imports and other shared resources). Approved airlock imports appear here — see Importing & Exporting Data.
  • /review-ro — visible only to airlock reviewers: files currently under review, mounted read-only for tool-based checking.

Desktops themselves are disposable — install-into-home or request additions through your operator rather than relying on system-level changes surviving a restart.

Working with the desktop

  • The clipboard and file transfer between your local machine and the desktop may be disabled depending on your environment's security posture — moving data in and out is what the airlock is for.
  • If the desktop shows a connection error, retry once before raising a ticket — transient reconnects usually recover immediately.