Connecting to ARCHER2

Once the HEC-WSI Support Team has accepted your request to join the HEC-WSI project (e773) you are ready to log onto the ARCHER2 service. The following steps are designed to briefly explain logging onto the ARCHER2 service. For detailed information please refer to the ARCHER2 User and Best Practice Guide – Connecting to ARCHER2 or the ARCHER2 Quickstart for Users page.

Step 1   If this is the first time you have logged onto ARCHER2 (with this particular login account) you will need to acquire your ‘initial password’ from the SAFE system. The SAFE web interface is used to provide your automatically generated initial password for logging onto ARCHER2 (see the SAFE Documentation for more details). The password can be found by logging into your SAFE account, selecting your HEC-WSI-related login account from the ‘Login Accounts’ tab and clicking on ‘View Login Account Password’.

Step 2   On the ARCHER2 system, interactive access is achieved using SSH, either directly from a command-line terminal or using an SSH client. As  of December 2023, you will need to use both an SSH key and a time-based one-time passcode (TOTP) to log into ARCER2. Assuming you have followed the HEC-WSI’s applying for project membership instructions, and have already generated an SSH Key pair and MFA token associated with your login account, you can log onto ARCHER2 using the following command, (remembering to replace <username> with your username):

ssh <username>@login.archer2.ac.uk

Alternatively, if you wish to allow remote programs, especially graphical applications, to control your local display, such as for a debugger, use

ssh –X <username>@login.archer2.ac.uk

NOTE: If your SSH key pair is not stored in the default location (usually ~/.ssh/) on your local system, you may need to specify the path to the private part of the key with the -i option to ssh. For example, if your key is in a file called ~/keys/SSHKey_ARCHER2 you would use the following command to log in:

ssh -i ~/keys/SSHKey_ARCHER2 <username>@login.archer2.ac.uk

Step 3   If you have set one, you will also have to enter the passphrase associated with your SSH key pair. If this is your first time logging onto ARCHER2 (with this particular login account), when prompted, you will have to enter your initial password (obtained from SAFE as per Step 1 above). You may then be prompted to set a new password or, as of December 2023, you will be prompted to enter a TOTP code. NOTE: after your initial login, you will only need to enter a TOTP code (and SSH key pair passphrase, if set).

TIP: Your new password must have both capital and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

Back to: applying for project membership