We are excited to offer a new tool and method for connecting to the RCE.  The NX protocol is an open protocol with client viewers that offer a consistent interface across the Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.

Unlike the VNC protocol, there is no need to establish a secure tunneled connection. The NoMachine NX client (a free download from the NoMachine wesbite) handles all of this for you.  You simply have to enter your username and password to establish a secure connection to the RCE.

NX client comes with other benefits, including dynamic resizing of your session window, better handling of slower connections, and more.

Future RCE updates will deprecate the use of VNC and will support only NX client connections, and we encourage you to start using the NX client now. Please contact us if you encounter any issues.  For information on connecting to the RCE with NX client, refer to the guide Connecting to the RCE.

By popular demand, we have reviewed our cluster scheduler and have made numerous updates to ensure a more even and fair distribution of resources.

Users should now see faster service times even if the cluster is 100% utilized thanks to our new scheduler algorithms, which take into account historical usage and current runtime of jobs on the cluster.

Please see Getting Started with Batch Processing for more information about how to use our batch cluster.

Several new options were added to the Applications menu, located in the upper-left corner of your RCE desktop. These items include the following:

• Documentation - Links to updated documentation available on this site.
• RCE Powered Applications - Scripts are included that enable our statistical applications to use the power of our cluster computing in an interactive, real-time mode. Select one of these options to run an interactive job that has sizeable requirements of memory, processing power, or storage.
• RCE Utilities - A graphical, user-friendly utility facilitates several common tasks, such as changing your shell, checking out CVS repositories, or checking for updates to the RCE.

For more information, see Connecting to the RCE and Using Statistical Programs.

We updated our CVS utilities, and you now can access them via the contextual menu in the file system browser.

A Scripts submenu is available when you use the desktop background right-click menu. From the Scripts option, select CVS to locate utilities that automate common CVS tasks. For example, to add files to a CVS repository:

1. Navigate to the files that you choose to add to CVS by using your file browser.
2. Right-click your files, select Scripts, select CVS, and then choose Add Files.
   Your files are added to your CVS repository.

More information can be found in Working with CVS in the RCE.

New channels of communication were added that improve your ability to be made aware of scheduled downtimes or other interruptions in service.

For more information, see Outage Notification.