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Generic Cluster Access

Gaining Access To Get Started

From an end-user perspective the Faculty HPC Clusters logically consists of login, compile and job submission roles. It is common to combine these roles within a single front-end machine. 

The faculty clusters have a dedicated front end head node with compute nodes. It is common to have a few physical networks at the back of the cluster. One simple Ethernet network may be implemented for server health monitoring. Another for data provisioning and file sharing where yet another, perhaps even non-Ethernet network like InfiniBand, may be used for inner-job high performance communication. Applications relying on message passing benefit greatly from lower latency.

The login node role is available to compile software, to submit a parallel or batch program to a job queuing system and to gather/analyse results. Other than when observing interactive jobs it should rarely be necessary for a user to log on to one of the slave nodes and in some cases slave node logins are disabled altogether.

Login to your environment

The head node is where you can log in to and work from. On the head node you can:

  • compile your code
  • develop applications
  • submit applications to the cluster for execution
  • monitor running applications

Most clusters are Linux based. To login using a *nix operating system, you can use a terminal. Then type

ssh username@clustername

or

ssh username@IPaddress

On a Windows operating system, you can download a SSH client, for instance, PuTTY, and enter the cluster's address and click connect. Enter your user name and password credentials when asked for. You can download PuTTY from the official website at: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/.

Software troubleshooting

  • When attempting to run an Ansys job, the job gets submitted, but fails to produce a results file and I receive an error message
    Capability CFX_SOLVER_BASIC_MP_LIMIT does not exist in the ANSYS licensing pool. Solution

Downloads

  • Tunnelier - SSH Terminal, Tunnelling and File Transfer Client
  • WinSCP - SFTP, FTP and SCP Client
  • Putty - Telnet and SSH Client