VS Code

VS Code

Follow these instructions to use VS Code on the SCF. You can either run VS Code on a login node or on one of the compute nodes in the SCF cluster. In either case VS Code will access files (including your home directory) on the SCF.

To connect to the SCF using VS Code,  you'll need to have installed the 'Remote Development' extension pack on your local VS Code.  Then to connect to the SCF, click on the blue icon labelled '><' in the lower left corner and choose "Host", providing one of the SCF login nodes.

If you want to access the cluster nodes (including GPUs available on some cluster nodes), you'll need to do one of the following.

  • Use VS Code through JupyterHub, selecting the cluster partition when you start your Jupyter server. This uses `code-server` to run VS Code in a web browser. A downside is that the extensions available are not exactly as with VS Code itself. In particular GitHub Copilot may not work as well.
  • You can use some ssh tricks to run VS Code on a cluster node with these steps:
    1. On one of the SCF login servers, request a Slurm "allocation" using with `salloc`, e.g., `salloc -c 4 -t 1:00:00` for one hour on four cores on the high (default) partition. The flags are the same flags one uses with `srun` and `sbatch`.
    2. Modify your  `~/.ssh/config` file on your local computer to include this new stanza:
      Host scf-slurm
  HostName scf-sm20.berkeley.edu # This must be the cluster node that `salloc` gave you.
  ProxyJump gandalf.berkeley.edu # This must be the login server on which you ran `salloc`.
    3. Now in VS Code on your personal machine, use the remote SSH extension to connect to the host `scf-slurm` by clicking on the blue icon labelled '><' in the lower left corner and setting "Host" to `scf-slurm`.
  • We have prepared a shell script that you could run on your Mac or Linux machine that will carry out Steps 1 and 2 above for you. You can run it like this: `scf-srun <insert Slurm job syntax here>`, e.g., `scf-srun -c 4 -t 1:00:00`. Note that the script will modify the configuration in your ~/.ssh directory (slightly modifying `~/.ssh/config` and adding a new file `~/.ssh/config.d/scf-slurm`.