The SeARCH web portal gives you access to the University of Minho’s high-performance computing cluster from your browser, with no SSH setup and nothing to install on your own computer.
From the portal you can:
- open Jupyter sessions (Python and R) and RStudio sessions;
- open a terminal on the cluster;
- browse and transfer files;
- submit and monitor jobs through the SLURM queue manager.
Signing in
- Open the portal address: search.di.uminho.pt/portal
- Sign in with your institutional credentials.
- The main dashboard appears.
You need a SeARCH account. If you do not have one yet, request it at the support address at the bottom of this page.
The dashboard menus
| Menu | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Files | Browse, upload and download files in your cluster storage |
| Jobs | Create and monitor jobs submitted to SLURM |
| Clusters | Open a terminal on the cluster |
| Interactive Apps | Launch Jupyter and RStudio sessions |
Starting a Jupyter session
- Under Interactive Apps, in the Servers section, choose Jupyter.
- Fill in the form: partition, number of cores, memory and session length. There is also a JupyterLab checkbox, if you prefer that interface to the classic Notebook.
- Click Launch.
- When the status turns to Running, click Connect to Jupyter.
Why the session takes a while to start. Launching an interactive session creates a SLURM job like any other, and it waits in the queue until resources are free. How long that takes depends on how busy the cluster is, not on the portal.
Your session runs on a compute node, with the resources you requested, not on a login node. That distinction explains a few limitations — the one people notice most is that sbatch does not work inside a notebook.
Choosing an environment
When you create a notebook (New menu), or through Kernel → Change Kernel in a notebook that is already open, you choose which environment to use. There are Python environments for computational chemistry, teaching and machine learning, and an R environment.
All of them are installed and maintained by the Department of Informatics and are visible to every portal user, with no personal setup. What each one contains is described on the environments page.
Starting an RStudio session
The procedure is the same: under Interactive Apps, choose RStudio Server, fill in the resource form and click Launch.
The session runs on a compute node with R 4.3.3 and around 154 packages already installed, including the tidyverse. Cluster data is directly accessible, so there is no need to copy it to your own machine. See environments.
Opening a terminal
Under Clusters → SeARCH Shell Access you get a terminal on the cluster, with the same environment you would have over SSH. It is the right place to compile code, manage files or submit jobs by hand.
The portal terminal opens on the search7edu2 login node, where all shared environments work.
If you connect over SSH instead. The cluster has several login nodes (search7, search7edu, search7edu2, search7sci) with processors of different generations. On the older ones — search7 in particular — some environments will not start. For interactive work with those environments, request a compute node first:
srun --pty -n 1 --mem=2G -t 60 bash
Where to go next
- environments — what each Python and R environment contains, and which one to pick
- usage examples — complete, runnable examples: quantum chemistry with ORCA, data analysis in R, machine learning on CPU
- troubleshooting — common errors and what to do about them
For writing and submitting SLURM job scripts in general, see the job scheduling and management and SLURM and commands sections of this user guide.
Support
For account requests, new environments, library installations or technical problems, contact the Department of Informatics: search-admin@di.uminho.pt
When reporting a problem, please include the job ID if there is one, the output and error files, and the full error message.
Last updated: November 2026