[orca-list] Orca Running on Remote Servers

["Louis Maher" <ljmaher swbell net>]

Folks,

My company uses Red Hat 5.7 on Massively Parallel computers.  A few of the
nodes of the cluster of processors are login nodes.  These login nodes are
used for code editing and job submission.

People in our company access the cluster through VNC (virtual network
computing) which provides a graphical user interface (GUI) window running on
Windows 7.

I access the cluster using the character-based SecureCRT windows program
which provides a SSH (secure shell) session into the cluster.  Once in the
cluster, I use the Linux screen program to get as many character- based
windows as I want.  The character-based approach is limited, and I do not
have access to the GUI-based job setup and queuing systems.  Often we write
plug-ins to commercial software, and that commercial software brings its own
powerful and inaccessible GUIs.

Questions:

If I had a laptop running Linux, is there a way to place Orca on the remote
server and give me a GUI interface into the remote cluster?  

Technically I could make my Linux laptop part of the cluster, but would the
job editing and job queuing programs need to be running on my laptop before
I could access them?

We have several domains, each with its own cluster.  If I wanted to access
these other domains, would I have to have a laptop specifically dedicated to
each domain?

Commercially available job-setup GUI's are extremely powerful for they
provide a means to connect several smaller plug-ins to make complex flows.
The output of the job scheduling GUI is an extremely complex XML file.  I
can make small changes in this file, but writing one of these files from
scratch is not practical.

So my base question is:
If I had a laptop running Linux, is there a way to place Orca on the remote
server and give me a GUI interface into remote computers?

I will have to use Red Hat 5.7 for my effort.




Regards
Louis Maher
713-444-7838
ljmaher swbell net