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To access a supercomputer, users have a Pawsey account, comprising a username and a password. The account must also be a member of an active project allocation on the selected supercomputer. For new users, an account creation email with instructions is sent when you receive an allocation or are added to a project.
Introduction
Pawsey supercomputers are accessed remotely through the SSH protocol. Most of the time users employ the ssh command-line tool installed on their computers, which allows executing commands through a terminal window; other programs implementing the SSH protocol may be used. To execute programs that display a graphical interface you can use X forwarding over SSH.When a connection is established with any of our systems, it is to a login node. Login nodes are the "front desk" of the system, and they allow users to manage their workflows, edit files, and submit jobs to the scheduler to be executed on the compute nodes. The compute nodes are where the main computations are processed and they can be accessed through the different queues or partitions managed by the scheduler. These concepts are illustrated in figure 1.Figure 1 illustrates some components of a supercomputer
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Figure 1. An abstract overview of a supercomputer architecture |
Use SSH to connect to a supercomputer
Within As detailed above, within many supercomputers, the nodes on which user jobs are run, often referred to as "compute" nodes, will NOT be directly accessiible from the outside world.
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Logging in to such "front-end" nodes at Pawsey requires users to run an SSH (Secure Shell) client on their local machine.
To execute programs that display a graphical interface you can use X forwarding over SSH.
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All Linux and macOS distributions come installed with a terminal application that can be used for SSH access to the login nodes.
Consult your Linux distribution's documentation for details on how to load a terminal.
Another popular terminal application for MacOS is iTerm2, which needs to be installed separately. |
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Pawsey currently has two classes of "front-end" nodes, one group, usually referred to as "login" nodes, which are designed for the submitting of jobs and editimg of files, and a second group, usually referred to as "data-mover" nodes, which have higher-speed connectivity to various Pawsey storage systems than the "login" nodes, and which are thus recommended as the group of nodes from which to perform any data transfer operations, both within Pawsey, and when moving data into, or out of, Pawsey.
In order to try and ensure that "front-end" node responsiveness isn't slowed down by having too many of our users on one "login" or "data-mover" node at the same time, Pawsey, in common with many other supercomputing centres, operates a system whereby users are encouraged to connect to a generic name for the service, "login" or "data-mover", which allows for a mechanism, known as "DNS round-robin", to transparently redirect the user's connection to one of a group of nodes, and so balance the load across the group.
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