Without an IDE, I can log in to an HPC interactive node by first sshing in to the server using:

ssh servername

Then I request an interactive node using

qrsh    # Sun Grid Engine
# OR
qsub -I # Slurm

I would like to do this with VS Code.

what has worked:

I have successfully used VS Code Remote+SSH extension for the first step, and this gets me to the head node. But the head node is only for very light work. I would like to access the interactive node.

I’ve previously used to Emacs tramp’s multi-hop approach for accessing interactive nodes on HPC clusters. In tramp, I can configure a custom method (e.g., “qsub”) that first SSHs into the head node and then runs a command like qsub -I or qrsh to allocate an interactive compute node.

The Emacs configuration (from this Emacs SE answer) looks like this:

(add-to-list 'tramp-methods
  '("qsub"
    (tramp-login-program        "qsub")
    (tramp-login-args           (("-I"))) 
    ...

questions:

Is there an equivalent way to do this in VS Code? Specifically, is there a way to configure the Remote-SSH extension to first connect to the head node and then automatically run qrsh (or another interactive session command) to request and eventually open a compute node?

If this is not directly supported, are there any recommended workarounds, SSH configurations, or extensions that can handle this use case?