I'm one of the Research Computing domain specialists at the University of California, Irvine. We provide >1000 applications (pre- and self-compiled) for our ~1500 cluster users. Most are commandline but we have a large minority that use graphics (MATLAB, Mathematica, ANSYS, SAS, STATA, CLCBio, etc) and for these we use X2Go, not only because it is Open Source, but because we have repeatedly compared it to commercial packages and found that either they are much harder to configure for our users, or they lack features that some of our users like (mostly shared folders), or their performance is either no better or considerably worse than X2Go.

We teach the use of it in our Linux on HPC tutorial to allow the use of specific GUI apps (esp editors and file transfer tools) and highly recommend it as a multiplatform access tool.

I also use it as a remote sysadmin tool (especially with PyHoca) to debug user access problems or to keep long-running GUI processes alive to monitor periodically (our BeeGFS filesystem monitor, the hated MegaRAID processes, etc).

I'd be happy to answer specific questions about how we use it as well.

- Harry Mangalam, PhD

UC Irvine