GpuTerm

The all-in-one SSH/SFTP desktop client for GPU servers.

Terminal, file transfers, and real-time CPU · RAM · Disk · GPU telemetry (NVIDIA / AMD / Intel / Apple Silicon) — in a single native window.

English · 한국어

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Working on a remote GPU box usually means juggling an SSH client, an SFTP tool, and a second terminal running watch nvidia-smi. GpuTerm replaces all three. Connect once and get an xterm.js terminal, a drag-and-drop SFTP browser, and a live telemetry bar that polls CPU, memory, disk, logged-in users, and every GPU on the host — NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, or Apple Silicon, on Linux, macOS, and Windows remotes alike — over its own SSH channel, so monitoring never blocks your shell.

Status: beta. Download the latest prerelease from the Releases page or build from source below.

Features

🖥️ SSH Terminal

• Full PTY terminal powered by xterm.js and Rust ssh2
• Multiple concurrent sessions — each keeps its own terminal, scrollback, and SFTP path; click a connected profile in the sidebar to switch
• ProxyJump — tunnel through a saved profile as a bastion (per-key-type host verification along the way)
• Password, private key (with passphrase), and SSH agent authentication
• UTF-8 safe streaming — multibyte characters (한글, 日本語, emoji) survive chunked reads
• MOTD and early output are buffered and replayed, never lost to connection races
• Automatic remote PTY resize and SSH keepalive

📁 SFTP Browser

• Side-by-side remote/local panels with drag-and-drop upload & download
• Streaming 1 MiB chunked transfers with a progress queue and per-file cancellation
• Downloads are written to a temporary file and atomically renamed — no partial files ever
• Overwrite confirmation, delete, mkdir, and a native OS folder picker
• Resizable split between terminal and SFTP panes (persisted across launches)

📊 Live Telemetry

• Bottom status bar polling CPU, RAM, disk, logged-in users, and NVIDIA, AMD (ROCm), Intel, and Apple Silicon GPUs every 1–10 s
• Click any section for a draggable, resizable detail popover: per-core CPU usage, top processes, VRAM/power/temperature per GPU, full mount list
• Pop any detail view out into its own OS window — it refreshes independently and closes with its session
• Telemetry runs on a dedicated SSH connection (per session) with automatic reconnect and exponential backoff
• Non-NVIDIA hosts gracefully fall back to system-only metrics

🔐 Security by default

• Passwords live in memory only — never written to disk
• Trust-on-first-use host key prompt with SHA-256 fingerprint; mismatches block the connection
• Restrictive Tauri Content Security Policy in production and development

Installation

Prebuilt binaries

Grab the installer for your OS from the latest release (.msi/.exe, .dmg, .deb/.AppImage).

Build from source

Prerequisites: Node.js ≥ 20, npm ≥ 10, Rust stable, and the Tauri prerequisites for your OS.

Per-OS prerequisite details

Windows

• Visual Studio Build Tools 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• WebView2 Runtime (preinstalled on Windows 10/11)
• Git for Windows
• Strawberry Perl (winget install StrawberryPerl.StrawberryPerl) — required to compile the vendored OpenSSL that backs the SSH library

macOS

xcode-select --install

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file \
  libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev

git clone https://github.com/fortranmentis/GPUTERM.git
cd GPUTERM
npm install

# Run the desktop app in development mode
npm run tauri:dev

# Package a distributable build (output: src-tauri/target/release/bundle)
npm run tauri:build

npm run dev starts the Vite frontend alone — useful for layout work, but SSH/SFTP/telemetry require the full Tauri app.

Usage

1. Create a profile — enter host, port, username, and a password or private key path in the sidebar. Press New to start a fresh profile, Save to keep it.
2. Connect — on first contact GpuTerm shows the server's SHA-256 host key fingerprint and asks for confirmation before trusting it. Connect as many servers as you like; connected profiles show a green dot, and clicking one switches the whole view to that session.
3. Work — type in the terminal, drag files between the SFTP panels, and watch live metrics in the bottom bar. Click CPU / RAM / Disk / GPU / Users for detail popovers you can drag around, resize, or pop out into separate windows with the ↗ button.

SFTP transfer details

• Drop multiple files at once; each becomes an independent queue item with progress, status, and error reporting.
• Running transfers can be canceled individually from the queue.
• If the target file exists, GpuTerm asks before overwriting.
• The last local directory is remembered across launches.
• Directory drag-and-drop is detected but not yet transferred (see Roadmap).

Telemetry configuration

• Interval: 1, 2 (default), 5, or 10 seconds — detail popovers poll on the same cadence.
• Mode: GPU + System, GPU only, or System only.
• Ignore FS: comma-separated filesystem types hidden from the disk summary (default: tmpfs, devtmpfs, squashfs, proc, sysfs, cgroup, cgroup2, overlay). The disk popover can temporarily reveal them.
• Mount points are prioritized / → /home → /data → /mnt* → /media* → others; disks ≥ 80% are flagged warning, ≥ 90% critical.

Remote commands executed for telemetry

All metrics come from standard tools over SSH — nothing is installed on the server.

Section	Linux	macOS	Windows
CPU	/proc/stat, /proc/loadavg, /proc/cpuinfo, nproc, lscpu	sysctl (brand, cores, P/E split, loadavg), top -l 2	Win32_Processor, Win32_PerfRawData_PerfOS_Processor (CIM)
Memory	/proc/meminfo	sysctl hw.memsize, vm_stat, vm.swapusage	Win32_OperatingSystem, Win32_PageFileUsage (CIM)
Disk	df -P -T -B1	df -P -k + mount	Win32_LogicalDisk (fixed drives)
Users	who	who	quser
GPU	nvidia-smi (NVIDIA), rocm-smi --json (AMD/ROCm), xpu-smi / intel_gpu_top (Intel) — auto-detected	ioreg -c IOAccelerator (Apple GPU utilization, no root needed)	nvidia-smi (NVIDIA, full metrics); WDDM GPU performance counters for AMD/Intel (utilization + VRAM)
Top processes	ps -eo … --sort=-%cpu / --sort=-rss	ps -Ao … -r / -m	Get-Process (two-sample CPU delta)

Commands run with a 3-second timeout on a dedicated SSH connection (10 s on Windows to absorb PowerShell start-up). Windows commands are batched into a single PowerShell 5.1 invocation per poll and sent as -EncodedCommand, so they work with either cmd.exe or PowerShell as the OpenSSH default shell — nothing is installed and no admin rights are required. GpuTerm detects the remote OS and available GPU tools per host and shows a vendor tag on every card; intel_gpu_top needs root or CAP_PERFMON, and Apple GPU power/temperature would need root powermetrics, so they show as n/a. If no GPU source is present, the GPU section reports unavailable while everything else keeps working.

Architecture

┌───────────────────────────── Tauri window ─────────────────────────────┐
│  React 19 + TypeScript + Zustand + xterm.js                            │
│    invoke() ──────────────► Tauri commands (Rust)                      │
│    listen() ◄────────────── terminal-output · remote-telemetry ·       │
│                             sftp-progress · terminal-closed            │
├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Rust backend (ssh2 / libssh2)                                         │
│    • Terminal      – PTY shell, dedicated connection per session       │
│    • Telemetry     – own connection, auto-reconnect with backoff       │
│    • SFTP ops      – pooled per-session "operations" connection        │
│    • Bulk transfer – dedicated connection per file, cancellable        │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Long-running work is isolated: blocking SSH I/O runs on spawn_blocking threads so the UI never freezes, and each concern (shell / telemetry / transfers) fails independently.

Data locations (%APPDATA%\GpuTerm on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/GpuTerm on macOS, ~/.config/GpuTerm on Linux):

File	Contents
sessions.json	Session profiles — host, port, username, key path only
known_hosts.json	Approved SHA-256 host key fingerprints
app_settings.json	UI preferences such as the last local SFTP directory

Passwords and private key contents are never written to any of these files.

Development

npm run test                                   # frontend tests (Vitest)
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml # backend tests
npm run build                                  # TypeScript + Vite production build

Project layout

src/                    React frontend
  components/           TerminalPane, SftpBrowser, RemoteTelemetryBar, popovers…
  stores/               Zustand stores (session, transfers)
  utils/                Shared formatters, terminal buffer, disk priority
src-tauri/src/ssh/      Rust backend
  terminal.rs           PTY shell + UTF-8 safe reader
  system_monitor.rs     Telemetry loop + parsers
  resource_details.rs   On-demand CPU/RAM/GPU detail collection
  sftp.rs               Transfers, cancellation, SFTP commands
  session.rs            Connections, host keys, profiles, connection pool

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Check
tauri:dev fails on Windows	VS Build Tools 2022 (C++ workload) + WebView2 Runtime installed, then restart the terminal
cargo not found	Install via rustup, reopen the terminal (%USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin on PATH)
SSH auth fails	Verify host/port/user/credentials; confirm the server allows the auth method
Host key mismatch	Verify the server fingerprint out-of-band, then remove the stale entry from known_hosts.json
GPU shows unavailable	Confirm a GPU tool is installed (nvidia-smi, rocm-smi, xpu-smi, or intel_gpu_top); other metrics still work regardless

Roadmap / Known limitations

• Keyboard-interactive SSH authentication is not implemented
• Recursive directory upload/download and transfer resume are not implemented
• known_hosts.json uses SHA-256 fingerprints, not the OpenSSH known_hosts format
• Telemetry supports Linux, macOS (Apple Silicon included), and Windows remotes; Apple GPU power/temperature and per-core CPU usage need root powermetrics and are not shown
• GPU monitoring uses nvidia-smi, rocm-smi, xpu-smi, intel_gpu_top, macOS ioreg, or Windows WDDM performance counters (AMD support on Linux currently targets rocm-smi)
• Windows remotes: requires Windows PowerShell 5.1+ (preinstalled); load averages don't exist and show as n/a; AMD/Intel GPUs report utilization and dedicated VRAM only (no power/temperature, needs Windows 10 1709+ with a WDDM 2.x driver); process owners and GPU process command lines need elevation and fall back to n/a / process names; quser is missing on Home editions, so the Users section stays empty there; hybrid iGPU+dGPU hosts show both cards (counters are attributed by adapter LUID from the DirectX registry, falling back to a positional heuristic if that key is unavailable)

Issues and pull requests are welcome — please run the test suites above before submitting.

License

MIT © GpuTerm contributors. Built with Tauri, React, xterm.js, and ssh2; third-party licenses remain with their authors.