Getting started
This page is meant to get you started on our resources and briefly list the essentials. In the menu on the left you will then find more in-depth documentation on these topics.
Getting access
To get access you need two things:
Information on available CPU hours and disk space
This will list your available projects and the remaining CPU hours (see also Projects and accounting):
$ cost
This will give you information about your disk Storage quota:
$ dusage
Logging in
Logging into the machines involves the use of Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, either in a terminal shell or through a graphical tool using this protocol under the hood. SSH login is available natively to Linux or macOS. Also on Windows a number of good tools for this exists.
For more information and examples see SSH.
$ ssh <username>@<machinename>
Replace <username>
with your registered username and <machinename>
with the
specific machine name.
The machine names are:
betzy.sigma2.no
- Betzyfram.sigma2.no
- Framsaga.sigma2.no
- Sagalogin.nird.sigma2.no
- NIRD - National Infrastructure for Research Data
If you are unfamiliar with working with Unix or want to refresh the basics, you may want to learn using the shell.
Transferring files
To copy files from your machine to the HPC machines, use SSH file transfer Protocol (SFTP) or Secure Copy (SCP). They are available as command-line tools for Linux and MacOS X but Windows users need to download a separate SCP or FTP client, such as WinSCP or MobaXterm.
For example, to copy projectfiles.tar.gz
from your local home directory
to the remote home directory of myusername
on
Fram, type (the colon at the end is important):
$ scp projectfiles.tar.gz myusername@fram.sigma2.no:
For more information please see our page on File transfer.
Remote desktop
The Fram and Saga systems provide a Remote desktop service.
Quickstart: Use a VNC client to log into desktop.fram.sigma2.no:5901
or
desktop.saga.sigma2.no:5901
. A web based remote desktop service is also
available https://desktop.fram.sigma2.no:6080. Access to these services are
blocked outside the Norwegian research network, e.g. only accessible from
UNINETT and partner institutions.
Modules
To keep track of the large number of different pieces of software that is typically available on a shared HPC cluster, we use something called a software module system. This allows us to have many different versions of compilers, libraries, and applications available for different users at the same time without conflicting each other.
By default when you log in to the cluster you will get a clean environment with
nothing but standard system compilers and libraries. In order to make your
favourite software application available to you, you need to load its module
into your environment, which is done using the module
command
$ module <options> <modulename>
Some of the more common options include:
avail
- list the available moduleslist
- list the currently loaded modulesload <modulename>
- load the module calledmodulename
unload <modulename>
- unload the module calledmodulename
show <modulename>
- display configuration settings formodulename
For more details please see Software module scheme.
Running applications
The HPC machines provide compute nodes for executing applications. To ensure fair access to the resources, the HPC machines run applications as jobs in a queue system, which schedules the tasks and process to run on compute nodes. All systems use the Slurm queue system.
A job is described by a batch script, which is a shell script (a text file)
with SBATCH
options to specify the needed resources and commands to perform
the calculations. All batch scripts must contain at least the following
two SBATCH
options (on Saga you also need to indicate maximum memory):
#!/bin/bash -l
# account name
#SBATCH --account=nnXXXXk
# max running time in d-hh:mm:ss
# this helps the scheduler to assess priorities and tasks
#SBATCH --time=0-00:05:00
For more details please see Running jobs.