This short tutorial should help you with logging in to and working on the LCC2 cluster at the University of Innsbruck. Please refer to the various links for more information or ask your course instructor in case of problems.
Larger clusters and supercomputers work differently than personal computers or laptops. They represent multiple individual computers (called nodes) that are connected via a fast network interconnect.
There are two types of nodes, one or a couple of login node(s) and a larger number of compute nodes. They all usually consist of the same hardware and software stack, but differ in their usage. The login nodes are used for logging in via ssh, compiling, editing scripts or configuration files, etc. Multiple people are working simultaneously on the same login nodes and they are not used for actual computation of your applications. For this purpose, the cluster has compute nodes, which are usually reserved exclusively for running applications.
The process of getting access to a compute node and running your application is handled by a so-called submission system which manages all node allocations, scheduling, cleanup, etc. Submission systems are required to allow a large number of scientists to share the same cluster without interference. The user interacts with these submission systems by writing job scripts, which tell the submission system what to do for a proper application execution. Hence, the usual working order on a cluster is
- ssh to the login node of your cluster
- compile the application and ensure it can be executed properly
- write a job script
- submit the job using the job script - the job will be placed in a queue and the submission system decides when it will be executed
- wait for the job to start, run, and finish and inspect the output
- depending on the output: either fix any bugs or enjoy the rest of the day
LCC2 is a cluster of the University of Innsbruck reserved exclusively for teaching purposes. The hardware is a bit dated (it used to be a fast, top-of-the-line scientific cluster in ~2009) but this is irrelevant for our purpose. The basic principles of supercomputers and high performance computing still apply, and the cluster is idle most of the time, ensuring short queuing times.
LCC2 is located on-campus and provides a single login node (lcc2.uibk.ac.at) and multiple compute nodes (n000-n0XX). The submission system used by LCC2 is SLURM. Each node consists of two Intel Xeon L5420 quad-core processors and 32 GB of main memory. The system is reachable only from within the UIBK network (requires VPN when working from home).
More documentation can be found on the ZID website https://www.uibk.ac.at/zid/systeme/hpc-systeme/lcc2/.
LCC2 has two main storage mount points, /home/cb76/<username> and /scratch/<username>, both of which are network-mounted on all login and compute nodes. The former is limited to 500 MB, hence if you run out of storage or start to get weird-looking I/O errors, consider moving your stuff to /scratch/<username>, which has a limit of 100 GB.
While you should consult the SLURM documentation (e.g. https://www.uibk.ac.at/zid/systeme/hpc-systeme/common/tutorials/slurm-tutorial.html) for further information, the most important commands are briefly described below:
sbatch <jobscript>- submit a jobscancel <job ID>- delete a job before or during executionsqu- show queued jobs of the clustersrun --pty bash- login interactively on a compute node (for short debugging sessions only, don't leave this open/idle)
While all commands can also be given to sbatch on the command line, users usually write job scripts for proper documentation and for keeping the command line invocation as short as possible. The commands in the job script are special comments, marked with #SBATCH, which are read and processed by sbatch. See job.sh for an example script.
Clusters usually have a lot of software packages installed, often in multiple versions, which might conflict with each other. For this purpose, they use the module system for managing which packages are visible to the user. The most important commands are:
module avail- show available modules that can be loadedmodule list- show modules currently loadedmodule load <module_name>- load a modulemodule unload <module_name>- unload a module
- Current workload of LCC2 (only works within the UIBK network): https://login.lcc2.uibk.ac.at/cgi-bin/slurm.pl
- Hardware details: https://www.uibk.ac.at/zid/systeme/hpc-systeme/lcc2/hardware/