Submit, monitor, and manage jobs on NSCC's Aspire HPC cluster without leaving the editor. Ship a project, submit PBS jobs, watch them run, and read live output — from a sidebar panel, or from an AI coding agent through a bundled MCP server.
What it does
- Submit panel — pick GPUs and walltime, paste the commands you want to run (one per line, for array jobs), and submit. No hand-written PBS script required.
- Job tree — every job you've submitted, grouped by project, refreshing on its own. Array jobs collapse into one entry with per-subjob status underneath.
- Live output — tail a running job's stdout/stderr as it happens, instead of waiting for it to finish.
- Status bar — connection state and a running/queued job count at a glance.
.pbs/.deflinting — squiggles and quick-fixes for common PBS script and Apptainer definition mistakes, before you submit.- An MCP server, so an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) can ship, submit, monitor, and diagnose jobs on your behalf — through the same core the UI uses, so the cluster rules can't drift between the two. A job your agent submits shows up in your sidebar within a second.
Requirements
Unattended SSH access to the cluster, set up once per machine. Aspire doesn't support SSH keys, so this extension keeps an SSH multiplexed connection alive and reads a locally stored password rather than prompting you every time.
From the UI: open the Aspire sidebar. With no credentials stored yet, it shows a
Set Up Credentials button — this opens a real terminal, since reading a password
without echoing it needs an actual TTY. Your password goes straight from that terminal to
~/.config/aspire/password (mode 600); the extension itself never sees or handles it.
Safe to re-run any time — each step checks the current state before changing anything.
Using it
| Submit panel | Pick GPUs/walltime, paste commands, submit — in the Aspire sidebar |
| Aspire sidebar | Jobs grouped by project, refreshing on their own |
| Status bar | $(server) Aspire: 2R 1Q, or off when disconnected |
Aspire: Test Connection |
Runs end-to-end checks (SSH, PBS, scratch) and reports results in the output channel |
Settings live under aspire.* in Settings (host alias, project code, remote directory
name, poll intervals). Set aspire.projectCode once to stop being asked for a charge code
on every submit.
Using it from an AI agent
Run "Aspire: Configure Agent Access (MCP)" from the Command Palette to wire up the
bundled MCP server for Claude Code or Codex — it exposes tools like ship_and_submit,
wait_for_job, tail_log, and validate_pbs.
For richer operational knowledge (cluster quirks, diagnosing failures, direct SSH fallbacks), run "Aspire: Install Claude Code Skill" — it installs a Claude Code skill straight from the extension, no separate marketplace or clone required.