  High Performance Research Desktops are used by HPC centers and research
computing organizations to lower the barrier of entry to HPC systems. These
Linux desktops are deployed alongside HPC systems, leveraging the investments
in HPC compute and storage infrastructure. By serving as a gateway to HPC
systems they provide users with an environment to perform setup and
infrastructure tasks related to the actual HPC work. Such tasks can take
significant amounts of time, are vital to the successful use of HPC systems,
and can benefit from a graphical desktop environment. In addition to serving as
a gateway to HPC systems, High Performance Research Desktops are also used to
run interactive graphical applications like MATLAB, RStudio or VMD. This paper
defines the concept of High Performance Research Desktops and summarizes use
cases from Indiana University, Lund University and Technical University of
Denmark, which have implemented and operated such a system for more than 10
years. Based on these use cases, possible future directions are presented.
