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Overview#

At NHPCC, we offer a nice web interface called OnDemand to access our HPC resources and facilities. Using OnDemand, you can easily create, submit and monitor your jobs, do file operations such as copy, move and paste, edit your files and download or upload them, use graphical desktops, start and use Jupyter and Rstudio servers, work with GUI softwares such as Matlab and more.

For more advanced user, we still provide ssh access to the cluster as the main approach.

To use OnDemand, you should login to our portal at

Logging into the OnDemand Web Portal#

You need to have an NHPCC account and have access to the cluster (please see service request and connecting to the cluster). Then simply go to the portal and login with your cluster username and password.

login page

After your successful login, you will see the welcome page:

welcome page

Logging out

Make sure to use private (in firefox) or incognito (in Chromium) browsing if you are in a public site. This is because in our current authentication method, the logout button will not actually work. We will add a more secure authentication system in near future.

On the navigation bar, you can see the following menus and buttons.

Files#

Files give you access to a file browser and have two submenus:

  • Home Directory - Your home directory on the cluster
  • /home/your_username/wrkdir - This is your space on the high performance storage of the cluster. See Sec. Working directory space for more info.
  • /home/your_username/blkdir - This is your bulk directory space on the cluster. See Sec. Bulk directory space for more info.

files

Upload size limit

There is a 100 MB file size upload limit on the portal. For larger files, you can use other tools like the scp, sftp and rsync commands or other softwares some of them should be natively available on certain Gnu/Linux distributions.

Jobs#

  • Active Jobs - You can list your jobs and cancel them by clicking on the delete job icon at the action part.

files

  • Job Composer - You can make use of available job templates to create your job scripts. Please follow the on-screen help messages. For instance, to create a GPU python job script, follow New Job > From Template > Python GPU Job Example

    files

    and click on the Create New Job button:

    files

    You can edit the script according to your needs and then submit your jobs:

    files

Clusters#

  • Shell Access - Shell access to a login node in your browser.
  • System Status - Very simple status of the cluster.

Interactive Apps#

Interactive apps are the most useful part of the portal. In all these apps, users have access to their files on the cluster storage locations (home, wrkdir and blkdir). We have prepared a bunch of apps, classified as:

  • Desktops: In desktop apps, users have access to and can use all the installed software using the module system. Currently, we offer two desktop flavors based on the SUSE and Ubuntu distributions.
  • GUIs: In this category, we have provided a variety of software with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) available on the cluster. Each software has its own specific form.
  • OSs: These are lightweight containers useful for specific purposes.
  • Servers: Web-based servers that are run on the cluster including Jupyter Lab and Rstudio. You can connect to them from your browser.
  • Shells: These apps provide a fast way to launch an interactive shell over the cluster.

files

Account usage calculation

When you launch an interactive app, your cluster account usage is billed based on the resources you allocated, regardless of whether you are actively running software or code. To optimize usage, we recommend:

  • Preparing all necessary materials (e.g., writing code or setting up models) before submitting your job.
  • Use partitions with cheaper (xeon24 and amd48) or more available resources (short).
  • You may use the portal’s built-in file editor for code preparation.

Unexpected job start

If your job remains in the queue, it may start when you are away from your computer. To stay informed, please provide your email address in the designated field. You will receive a notification as soon as your job begins.

Help#

  • Online Documentation - Takes you to the documentations.
  • Restart Web Server - ‌Before contacting us, please try this if you see any strange issue or if the portal acts weird.