Computational chemistry, Locally? My rant on SSH

Summary

One of my projects is predicting the spectra of proteins. To do this, I design molecules, then get a computer to optimise their geometries and find the energy levels. Most do this kind of work on a University high performance computing cluster.But here's something I noticed when doing this many times. When I need to remote into a cluster, the first part is to log in. I need to first login to the University VPN, which means using some outdated software to get the VPN set up from my computer. And then there is the authentication part, where the VPN software makes you jump through multiple authentication and 2FA processes to log in. And then when the 2FA window finally comes, I need to dig out my phone from somewhere in my room to get the code. Probably on average I find that the VPN + ssh + 2FA process takes 30 seconds every time I need to do something, which generally feels like too much.It's not too much work overall, but there are a lot of intermediate steps and riff-raff.I call this clunkiness. Something is clunky when there are many intermediate steps required to do one task. You know those really annoying shower controls in fancy hotels when you need to adjust two separate knobs for the pressure and temperature separately? That's clunky.It’s clunky to do work in University compute clusters.A bit of clunkiness in using something is usually fine. But if the clunkiness is even slightly more than a bit, the effects can be disastrous. If there are too many intermediate steps to get started to work on something, I become less motivated to work on it, forget about it, and in the worst case scenario just drop the endeavour entirely. Which means that an entire stream of work can be lost for small and trivial reasons. This happens with a lot of things! For example, it's really clunky to descale my coffee machine, and so I never end up doing it, and so it always breaks.The friction in using these clusters has been enough to actually stop me from doing work that I would've ...