Computational chemistry, Locally? My rant on SSH
Summary
The post critiques the friction of accessing university HPC clusters via VPN, SSH, and 2FA, describing how clunky login flows reduce motivation and productivity for researchers. It discusses challenges with remote workflows, log visualization, and file transfer, and proposes local compute as a potential alternative, including use of macFUSE/sshfs and Claude Code for easier setup. The piece includes concrete performance comparisons between cluster runs and a Mac, highlighting practical trade-offs for independent researchers.