Cluster Quick Start Guide
The CS HPC cluster is intended for research use only. For this reason MSc and undergraduate students are only granted access when working on a research project, and should first have their code working on the departmental timeshare machines (GPU: blaze, non-GPU: short).
Cluster Accounts
Please fill in this form in order to get an account on the CS cluster. You will need a CS account before you can get a cluster account. Everyone in the CS department already has one of these, if you need to apply for one there is an option on the same form. Your cluster account credentials are the same as your CS account credentials.
If you don’t know your CS account credentials you will need to pick these up in person. The account details can be collected from room 4.20 Malet Place Engineering Building. Please bring your UCL ID card with you as proof of ID.
Accessing the Cluster
To access the cluster you need to ssh into a login node. In order to be able to ssh to a login node, you first need to be on the Computer Science network. To do this, first log into one of the CS gateway machines. These are tails.cs.ucl.ac.uk (for staff) and knuckles.cs.ucl.ac.uk (for students, including MSc).
First, ssh to the gateway node:
ssh username@knuckles.cs.ucl.ac.uk
replacing username with your CS username.
From here, ssh to the appropriate login node:
- GPU Service – beaker.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- CMIC/MedPys – comic2.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- Biosciences, SLMS, UCLEB & BLIC – pchuckle.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- City of London Cancer Centre – gamble.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- Economics/Stats/Financial Computing – peacock.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- Computer Science – vic.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- Computer Sciences – NLP/MR/CSML – pryor.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- Computer Science Bioinfomatics – morecambe2.cs.ucl.ac.uk
- Other – wise.cs.ucl.ac.uk (currently still on old cluster, but moving soon)
If for any reason your assigned node is not working you can use one of the others.
For further information about ssh-ing, including how to set up an ssh tunnel, click here.
Making Best Use of the Cluster
You will need to be familiar with Linux in order to use the cluster. If you need to brush up on your skills then software-carpentry.org offer a lesson on the unix shell. You should work through this along with the shell-extras lesson. This will take you through all the concepts that you will need to know in order to use the cluster. We offer an hour long cluster induction session where we will take you through the services that are available and their proper usage. These are run on demand, if you would like to book one then please contact us.
Please see the full guide for additional information.