Desktops in the Cloud

Join today
  • Instructor:  Chris Geroux
  • Level: Beginner
  • Duration: 3 hours
  • Helpers: TBD
  • Date:  November 4, 2025 | 1:00 - 4:00 pm (Atlantic)
  • Prerequisite: The Unix Shell or similar experience
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COURSE DESCRIPTION

The Cloud provides access to hardware resources beyond those available on your laptop or desktop, though you may still want to interact with that hardware as if it were your laptop using a graphical user interface (GUI) desktop. In this workshop we will install a GUI desktop on a remote virtual machine and connect to it from our laptop allowing us to use this remote desktop almost as if it were our local machine.

SETUP REQUIREMENTS

Meet your teaching team

Chris Geroux

Instructor

Research Consultant
Ph.D. Astrophysics, Saint Mary’s University

Chris has been working in HPC since 2005 and joined ACENET in 2015. He is based at Dalhousie University and has a focus on cloud. For his PhD he developed a C++ code to model stellar convection using the OpenMPI framework for parallelism. He also was an associate research fellow at the University of Exeter. Since joining ACENET Chris is been involved in developing the national cloud documentation and is a member of the cloud national team.

Tannia Chevez

Host

Digital Training Specialist
BSc Computational Chemistry, Memorial University

Tannia joined ACENET in 2023 and is based in St. John’s. She has held positions as a research assistant in various departments, with responsibilities ranging from developing algorithms for an online animal sound repository, to crafting chemical composite films. Proficient in Python, Java, and JavaScript, she has focused on spectral data analysis, SEM image-based nanoparticle detection, and software development for data analysis. Tannia contributed significantly to the publication of a research paper by analyzing potential environmental toxicants, generating millions of chemical structure IDs, and conducting data extraction and analysis using Python, R, and JavaScript, as well as enhancing algorithms for simulating potential environmental toxicants’ behavior in water, soil, and air environments. Tannia’s teaching experience includes a Leader Instructor at Brilliant Labs where she taught a range of digital topics, and a Digital Literacy Instructor for the Association for New Canadians.