Getting Started

1. Name it

   1–54 characters: letters, numbers and internal hyphens. The name has to be unique within the region, and it's how you'll recognise the machine in your VM list later.

2. Pick a region

   Germany West Central or East US. Choose whichever is closer to you — latency has a bigger effect on how a remote desktop feels than anything else you can control.

3. Pick a size

   From 2 vCPU / 8 GB up to 64 vCPU / 256 GB, with the hourly rate shown on each card. Start small — you're setting a case up, not running it at scale, and you can always create a larger sandbox later.

4. Set an admin password (optional)

   Leave it blank and a strong one is generated for you, which you can read back from the VM details at any time. That's the better choice: this password is the only thing protecting an internet-facing Remote Desktop port.

Getting your credentials

Click the info icon on any VM row. Every value has a copy button.

Open My VMs, find your machine, and click the info icon to open its details. The public IP, admin username and admin password are all there, each with a copy button — the password stays hidden until you click the eye icon.

1. Press Win + R, type mstsc and press Enter.
2. Paste the public IP into Computer and click Connect.
3. Accept the certificate warning — xrdp uses a self-signed certificate, which is expected.
4. xrdp shows its own login screen. Leave Session set to Xorg, then enter the admin username and password — the Linux account from the VM details, not a Windows login.
5. It sits on "Just connecting" for a moment, then your GNOME desktop loads.

Open a terminal on the sandbox and run this once after your first login. It prints the location and version of everything preinstalled, so you know the toolchain is healthy before you put a real case through it.

echo "================================"
echo "PALACE"
echo "================================"

which palace
palace --help 2>&1 | head -10

echo
echo "================================"
echo "MPI"
echo "================================"

which mpirun
mpirun --version | head -10

echo
echo "================================"
echo "PYFR"
echo "================================"

which pyfr
pyfr --version

/opt/pyfr/bin/python -c '
from mpi4py import MPI
print(MPI.Get_library_version())
'

echo
echo "================================"
echo "MFC"
echo "================================"

cd /opt/MFC
git describe --tags --always
./mfc.sh --help | head -20

echo
echo "================================"
echo "BLENDER"
echo "================================"

blender --version | head -10

blender \
    -b \
    --factory-startup \
    --python-expr \
    'import bpy; print("Blender Python OK:", bpy.app.version_string)'

echo
echo "================================"
echo "ALL BASIC CHECKS COMPLETE"
echo "================================"

Each block should print a path and a version. An empty which result means that tool isn't on your PATH — PyFR lives under /opt/pyfr and MFC under /opt/MFC, so you can always call them by full path.

What's in your sandbox

Because you have root, you can install anything else with apt or pip for the life of that VM.

Getting files in and out

For anything larger than a snippet, use scp from your own machine rather than the remote desktop clipboard. Substitute the username and IP from the VM details.

# copy a case onto the sandbox
scp -r ./my-case <admin-username>@<public-ip>:~/

# pull results back when the run finishes
scp -r <admin-username>@<public-ip>:~/my-case/results ./

The sandbox is scratch space. Keep the authoritative copy of your work somewhere you control — deleting a VM destroys its disk permanently.