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/.
