Speed: The GCS ENCS Cluster

Serguei A. Mokhov
Gillian A. Roper
Carlos Alarcón Meza
Network, Security and HPC Group
Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
rt-ex-hpc~AT~encs.concordia.ca

Version 7.0

The group acknowledges the initial manual version VI produced by Dr. Scott Bunnell while with us as well as Dr. Tariq Daradkeh for his instructional support of the users and contribution of examples.

Abstract

This document presents a quick start guide to the usage of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science compute server farm called “Speed” – the GCS Speed cluster, managed by the HPC/NAG group of the Academic Information Technology Services (AITS) at GCS, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

Contents

1 Introduction
 1.1 Resources
 1.2 Team
 1.3 What Speed Consists of
 1.4 What Speed Is Ideal For
 1.5 What Speed Is Not
 1.6 Available Software
 1.7 Requesting Access
2 Job Management
 2.1 Getting Started
  2.1.1 SSH Connections
  2.1.2 Environment Set Up
 2.2 Job Submission Basics
  2.2.1 Directives
  2.2.2 Module Loads
  2.2.3 User Scripting
 2.3 Sample Job Script
 2.4 Common Job Management Commands Summary
 2.5 Advanced sbatch Options
 2.6 Array Jobs
 2.7 Requesting Multiple Cores (i.e., Multithreading Jobs)
 2.8 Interactive Jobs
  2.8.1 Command Line
  2.8.2 Graphical Applications
 2.9 Scheduler Environment Variables
 2.10 SSH Keys For MPI
 2.11 Creating Virtual Environments
  2.11.1 Anaconda
  2.11.2 Python
 2.12 Example Job Script: Fluent
 2.13 Example Job: efficientdet
 2.14 Java Jobs
 2.15 Scheduling On The GPU Nodes
  2.15.1 CUDA
  2.15.2 Special Notes for sending CUDA jobs to the GPU Queue
  2.15.3 OpenISS Examples
 2.16 Singularity Containers
3 Conclusion
 3.1 Important Limitations
 3.2 Tips/Tricks
 3.3 Use Cases
A History
 A.1 Acknowledgments
 A.2 Migration from UGE to SLURM
 A.3 Phases
  A.3.1 Phase 4
  A.3.2 Phase 3
  A.3.3 Phase 2
  A.3.4 Phase 1
B Frequently Asked Questions
 B.1 Where do I learn about Linux?
 B.2 How to use the “bash shell” on Speed?
  B.2.1 How do I set bash as my login shell?
  B.2.2 How do I move into a bash shell on Speed?
  B.2.3 How do I use the bash shell in an interactive session on Speed?
  B.2.4 How do I run scripts written in bash on Speed?
 B.3 How to resolve “Disk quota exceeded” errors?
  B.3.1 Probable Cause
  B.3.2 Possible Solutions
  B.3.3 Example of setting working directories for COMSOL
  B.3.4 Example of setting working directories for Python Modules
 B.4 How do I check my job’s status?
 B.5 Why is my job pending when nodes are empty?
  B.5.1 Disabled nodes
  B.5.2 Error in job submit request.
C Sister Facilities
Annotated Bibliography

1 Introduction

This document contains basic information required to use “Speed” as well as tips and tricks, examples, and references to projects and papers that have used Speed. User contributions of sample jobs and/ or references are welcome. Details are sent to the hpc-ml mailing list.

Note: On October 20, 2023 with workshops prior, we have completed migration to SLURM (see Figure 2) from Grid Engine (UGE/AGE) as our job scheduler, so this manual has been ported to use SLURM’s syntax and commands. If you are a long-time GE user, see Appendix A.2 key highlights of the move needed to translate your GE jobs to SLURM as well as environment changes. These are also elaborated throughout this document and our examples as well in case you desire to re-read it.

If you wish to cite this work in your acknowledgements, you can use our general DOI found on our GitHub page https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5683642 or a specific version of the manual and scripts from that link individually.

1.1 Resources

1.2 Team

Speed is supported by:

We receive support from the rest of AITS teams, such as NAG, SAG, FIS, and DOG.
https://www.concordia.ca/ginacody/aits.html

1.3 What Speed Consists of

PIC

Figure 1: Speed

PIC

Figure 2: Speed SLURM Architecture

1.4 What Speed Is Ideal For

1.5 What Speed Is Not

1.6 Available Software

We have a great number of open-source software available and installed on “Speed” – various Python, CUDA versions, C++/Java compilers, OpenGL, OpenFOAM, OpenCV, TensorFlow, OpenMPI, OpenISS, MARF [24], etc. There are also a number of commercial packages, subject to licensing contributions, available, such as MATLAB [1323], Abaqus [1], Ansys, Fluent [2], etc.

To see the packages available, run ls -al /encs/pkg/ on speed.encs. In particular, there are over 2200 programs available in /encs/bin and /encs/pkg under Scientific Linux 7 (EL7). We are building an equivalent array of programs for the EL9 SPEED2 nodes.

1.7 Requesting Access

After reviewing the “What Speed is” (Section 1.4) and “What Speed is Not” (Section 1.5), request access to the “Speed” cluster by emailing: rt-ex-hpc AT encs.concordia.ca. CGS ENCS faculty and staff may request access directly. Students must include the following in their message:

Non-GCS faculty / students need to get a “sponsor” within GCS, such that your guest GCS ENCS account is created first. A sponsor can be any GCS Faculty member you collaborate with. Failing that, request the approval from our Dean’s Office; via our Associate Deans Drs. Eddie Hoi Ng or Emad Shihab. External entities to Concordia who collaborate with CGS Concordia researchers, should also go through the Dean’s office for approvals. Non-GCS students taking a GCS course do have their GCS ENCS account created automatically, but still need the course instructor’s approval to use the service.

2 Job Management

In these instructions, anything bracketed like so, <>, indicates a label/value to be replaced (the entire bracketed term needs replacement). We use SLURM as the Workload Manager. It supports primarily two types of jobs: batch and interactive. Batch jobs are used to run unattended tasks.

TL;DR: Job instructions in a script start with #SBATCH prefix, for example:

#SBATCH --account=speed1 --mem=100M -t 600 -J job-name
#SBATCH --gpus=2 --mail-type=ALL -t 600 --mail-user=$USER

We use srun for every complex compute step inside the script. Use interactive jobs to set up virtual environments, compilation, and debugging. salloc is preferred; allows multiple steps. srun can start interactive jobs as well (see Section 2.8). Required and common job parameters: job-name (J), mail-type, mem, ntasks (n), cpus-per-task, account, -p (partition).

2.1 Getting Started

Before getting started, please review the “What Speed is” (Section 1.4) and “What Speed is Not” (Section 1.5). Once your GCS ENCS account has been granted access to “Speed”, use your GCS ENCS account credentials to create an SSH connection to speed (an alias for speed-submit.encs.concordia.ca). All users are expected to have a basic understanding of Linux and its commonly used commands (see Appendix B.1 for resources).

2.1.1 SSH Connections

Requirements to create connections to Speed:

  1. An active GCS ENCS user account, which has permission to connect to Speed (see Section 1.7).
  2. If you are off campus, an active connection to Concordia’s VPN. Accessing Concordia’s VPN requires a Concordia netname.
  3. Windows systems require a terminal emulator such as PuTTY, Cygwin, or MobaXterm.
  4. macOS systems do have a Terminal app for this or xterm that comes with XQuarz.

Open up a terminal window and type in the following SSH command being sure to replace <ENCSusername> with your ENCS account’s username.

ssh <ENCSusername>@speed.encs.concordia.ca

Read the AITS FAQ: How do I securely connect to a GCS server?

2.1.2 Environment Set Up

After creating an SSH connection to Speed, you will need to make sure the srun, sbatch, and salloc commands are available to you. Type the command name at the command prompt and press enter. If the command is not available, e.g., (“command not found”) is returned, you need to make sure your $PATH has /local/bin in it. To view your $PATH type echo $PATH at the prompt.

The next step is to copy a job template to your home directory and to set up your cluster-specific storage. Execute the following command from within your home directory. (To move to your home directory, type cd at the Linux prompt and press Enter.)

cp /home/n/nul-uge/template.sh . && mkdir /speed-scratch/$USER

Tip: the default shell for GCS ENCS users is tcsh. If you would like to use bash, please contact rt-ex-hpc AT encs.concordia.ca.

Note, if you are getting “command not found” error(s) when logging in, you probably have old Grid Engine environment commands. Remove them as per Appendix A.2.

2.2 Job Submission Basics

Preparing your job for submission is fairly straightforward. Start by basing your job script on one of the examples available in the src/ directory of our GitHub’s (https://github.com/NAG-DevOps/speed-hpc). Job scripts are broken into four main sections:

You can clone the tip of our repository to get the examples to start with or download them individually via a browser or command line:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/NAG-DevOps/speed-hpc.git
cd speed-hpc/src

Then to quickly run some sample jobs, you can:

sbatch -p ps -t 10 bash.sh
sbatch -p ps -t 10 env.sh
sbatch -p ps -t 10 manual.sh
sbatch -p pg -t 10 lambdal-singularity.sh

2.2.1 Directives

Directives are comments included at the beginning of a job script that set the shell and the options for the job scheduler. The shebang directive is always the first line of a script. In your job script, this directive sets which shell your script’s commands will run in. On “Speed”, we recommend that your script use a shell from the /encs/bin directory.

To use the tcsh shell, start your script with #!/encs/bin/tcsh. For bash, start with #!/encs/bin/bash. Directives that start with #SBATCH, set the options for the cluster’s SLURM scheduler. The script template, template.sh, provides the essentials:

#SBATCH --job-name=tmpdir           ## Give the job a name
#SBATCH --mail-type=ALL             ## Receive all email type notifications
#SBATCH --mail-user=$USER@encs.concordia.ca
#SBATCH --chdir=./                  ## Use current directory as working directory
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=<corecount> ## Request, e.g. 8 cores
#SBATCH --mem=<memory>              ## Assign, e.g., 32G memory per node

and its short option equivalents:

#SBATCH -J tmpdir                   ## Give the job a name
#SBATCH --mail-type=ALL             ## Receive all email type notifications
#SBATCH --mail-user=$USER@encs.concordia.ca
#SBATCH --chdir=./                  ## Use current directory as working directory
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -n 8                        ## Request 8 cores
#SBATCH --mem=32G                   ## Assign 32G memory per node

Replace, <jobname>, with the name that you want your cluster job to have; --chdir, makes the current working directory the “job working directory”, and your standard output file will appear here; --mail-type, provides e-mail notifications (success, error, etc. or all); replace, <corecount>, with the degree of (multithreaded) parallelism (i.e., cores) you attach to your job (up to 32 by default).

Replace, <memory>, with the value (in GB), that you want your job’s memory space to be (up to 500 depending on the node), and all jobs MUST have a memory-space assignment. If you are unsure about memory footprints, err on assigning a generous memory space to your job, so that it does not get prematurely terminated. You can refine --mem values for future jobs by monitoring the size of a job’s active memory space on speed-submit with:

sacct -j <jobID>
sstat -j <jobID>

This can be customized to show specific columns:

sacct -o jobid,maxvmsize,ntasks%7,tresusageouttot%25 -j <jobID>
sstat -o jobid,maxvmsize,ntasks%7,tresusageouttot%25 -j <jobID>

Memory-footprint values are also provided for completed jobs in the final e-mail notification (as, “maxvmsize”). Jobs that request a low-memory footprint are more likely to load on a busy cluster.

Other essential options are -t and -A.

2.2.2 Module Loads

As your job will run on a compute or GPU “Speed” node, and not the submit node, any software that is needed must be loaded by the job script. Software is loaded within the script just as it would be from the command line.

To see a list of which modules are available, execute the following from the command line on speed-submit.

module avail

To list for a particular program (matlab, for example):

module -t avail matlab

Which, of course, can be shortened to match all that start with a particular letter:

module -t avail m

Insert the following in your script to load the matlab/R2020a) module:

module load matlab/R2020a/default

Use, unload, in place of, load, to remove a module from active use.

To list loaded modules:

module list

To purge all software in your working environment:

module purge

Typically, only the module load command will be used in your script.

2.2.3 User Scripting

The last part the job script is the scripting that will be executed by the job. This part of the job script includes all commands required to set up and execute the task your script has been written to do. Any Linux command can be used at this step. This section can be a simple call to an executable or a complex loop which iterates through a series of commands.

Any compute heavy step is preferably should be prefixed by srun as the best practice.

Every software program has a unique execution framework. It is the responsibility of the script’s author (e.g., you) to know what is required for the software used in your script by reviewing the software’s documentation. Regardless of which software your script calls, your script should be written so that the software knows the location of the input and output files as well as the degree of parallelism.

Jobs which touch data-input and data-output files more than once, should make use of TMPDIR, a scheduler-provided working space almost 1 TB in size. TMPDIR is created when a job starts, and exists on the local disk of the compute node executing your job. Using TMPDIR results in faster I/O operations than those to and from shared storage (which is provided over NFS).

An sample job script using TMPDIR is available at /home/n/nul-uge/templateTMPDIR.sh: the job is instructed to change to $TMPDIR, to make the new directory input, to copy data from $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/references/ to input/ ($SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR represents the current working directory), to make the new directory results, to execute the program (which takes input from $TMPDIR/input/ and writes output to $TMPDIR/results/), and finally to copy the total end results to an existing directory, processed, that is located in the current working directory. TMPDIR only exists for the duration of the job, though, so it is very important to copy relevant results from it at job’s end.

2.3 Sample Job Script

Now, let’s look at a basic job script, tcsh.sh in Figure 3 (you can copy it from our GitHub page or from /home/n/nul-uge).

#!/encs/bin/tcsh 
 
#SBATCH --job-name=tcsh-test 
#SBATCH --mem=1G 
 
sleep 30 
module load gurobi/8.1.0 
module list
Figure 3: Source code for tcsh.sh

The first line is the shell declaration (also know as a shebang) and sets the shell to tcsh. The lines that begin with #SBATCH are directives for the scheduler.

The script then:

The scheduler command, sbatch, is used to submit (non-interactive) jobs. From an ssh session on speed-submit, submit this job with sbatch ./tcsh.sh. You will see, "Submitted batch job 2653" where \(2653\) is a job ID assigned. The commands, squeue and sinfo can be used to look at the status of the cluster: squeue -l. You will see something like this:

[serguei@speed-submit src] % squeue -l
Thu Oct 19 11:38:54 2023
JOBID PARTITION     NAME     USER    STATE       TIME TIME_LIMI  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
 2641        ps interact   b_user  RUNNING   19:16:09 1-00:00:00      1 speed-07
 2652        ps interact   a_user  RUNNING      41:40 1-00:00:00      1 speed-07
 2654        ps tcsh-tes  serguei  RUNNING       0:01 7-00:00:00      1 speed-07
[serguei@speed-submit src] % sinfo
PARTITION AVAIL  TIMELIMIT  NODES  STATE NODELIST
ps*          up 7-00:00:00     14  drain speed-[08-10,12,15-16,20-22,30-32,35-36]
ps*          up 7-00:00:00      1    mix speed-07
ps*          up 7-00:00:00      7   idle speed-[11,19,23-24,29,33-34]
pg           up 1-00:00:00      1  drain speed-17
pg           up 1-00:00:00      3   idle speed-[05,25,27]
pt           up 7-00:00:00      7   idle speed-[37-43]
pa           up 7-00:00:00      4   idle speed-[01,03,25,27]

Remember that you only have 30 seconds before the job is essentially over, so if you do not see a similar output, either adjust the sleep time in the script, or execute the sbatch statement more quickly. The squeue output listed above shows you that your job is running on node speed-07, that it has a job number of 2654, its time limit of 7 days, etc.

Once the job finishes, there will be a new file in the directory that the job was started from, with the syntax of, slurm-"job id".out, so in this example the file is, slurm-2654.out. This file represents the standard output (and error, if there is any) of the job in question. If you look at the contents of your newly created file, you will see that it contains the output of the, module list command. Important information is often written to this file.

2.4 Common Job Management Commands Summary

Here are useful job-management commands:

2.5 Advanced sbatch Options

In addition to the basic sbatch options presented earlier, there are a few additional options that are generally useful:

The many sbatch options available are read with, man sbatch. Also note that sbatch options can be specified during the job-submission command, and these override existing script options (if present). The syntax is, sbatch [options] PATHTOSCRIPT, but unlike in the script, the options are specified without the leading #SBATCH (e.g., sbatch -J sub-test --chdir=./ --mem=1G ./tcsh.sh).

2.6 Array Jobs

Array jobs are those that start a batch job or a parallel job multiple times. Each iteration of the job array is called a task and receives a unique job ID. Only supported for batch jobs; submit time \(< 1\) second, compared to repeatedly submitting the same regular job over and over even from a script.

To submit an array job, use the --array option of the sbatch command as follows:

sbatch --array n-m[:s]] <batch_script>

-t Option Syntax:

Examples:

Output files for Array Jobs:

The default and output and error-files are slurm-job_id_task_id.out. This means that Speed creates an output and an error-file for each task generated by the array-job as well as one for the super-ordinate array-job. To alter this behavior use the -o and -e option of sbatch.

For more details about Array Job options, please review the manual pages for sbatch by executing the following at the command line on speed-submit man sbatch.

2.7 Requesting Multiple Cores (i.e., Multithreading Jobs)

For jobs that can take advantage of multiple machine cores, up to 32 cores (per job) can be requested in your script with:

#SBATCH -n [#cores]

Both sbatch and salloc support -n on the command line, and it should always be used either in the script or on the command line as the default \(n=1\). Do not request more cores than you think will be useful, as larger-core jobs are more difficult to schedule. On the flip side, though, if you are going to be running a program that scales out to the maximum single-machine core count available, please (please) request 32 cores, to avoid node oversubscription (i.e., to avoid overloading the CPUs).

Important note about --ntasks or --ntasks-per-node (-n) talks about processes (usually the ones ran with srun). --cpus-per-task (-c) corresponds to threads per process. Some programs consider them equivalent, some don’t. Fluent for example uses --ntasks-per-node=8 and --cpus-per-task=1, some just set --cpus-per-task=8 and --ntasks-per-node=1. If one of them is not \(1\) then some applications need to be told to use \(n*c\) total cores.

Core count associated with a job appears under, “AllocCPUS”, in the, qacct -j, output.

[serguei@speed-submit src] % squeue -l
Thu Oct 19 20:32:32 2023
JOBID PARTITION     NAME     USER    STATE       TIME TIME_LIMI  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
 2652        ps interact   a_user  RUNNING   9:35:18 1-00:00:00      1 speed-07
[serguei@speed-submit src] % sacct -j 2652
JobID           JobName  Partition    Account  AllocCPUS      State ExitCode
------------ ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- --------
2652         interacti+         ps     speed1         20    RUNNING      0:0
2652.intera+ interacti+                speed1         20    RUNNING      0:0
2652.extern      extern                speed1         20    RUNNING      0:0
2652.0       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20  COMPLETED      0:0
2652.1       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20  COMPLETED      0:0
2652.2       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20     FAILED      7:0
2652.3       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20     FAILED      7:0
2652.4       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20  COMPLETED      0:0
2652.5       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20  COMPLETED      0:0
2652.6       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20  COMPLETED      0:0
2652.7       gydra_pmi+                speed1         20  COMPLETED      0:0

2.8 Interactive Jobs

Job sessions can be interactive, instead of batch (script) based. Such sessions can be useful for testing, debugging, and optimising code and resource requirements, conda or python virtual environments setup, or any likewise preparatory work prior to batch submission.

2.8.1 Command Line

To request an interactive job session, use, salloc [options], similarly to a sbatch command-line job, e.g.,

salloc -J interactive-test --mem=1G -p ps -n 8

Inside the allocated salloc session you can run shell commands as usual; it is recommended to use srun for the heavy compute steps inside salloc. If it is a quick a short job just to compile something, e.g., on a GPU node you can use an interactive srun directly (note no srun can run within srun), e.g., a 1 hour allocation:

For tcsh:

srun --pty -n 8 -p pg --gpus=1 -t 60 /encs/bin/tcsh

For bash:

srun --pty -n 8 -p pg --gpus=1 -t 60 /encs/bin/bash

2.8.2 Graphical Applications

If you need to run an on-Speed graphical-based UI application (e.g., MALTLAB, Abaqus CME, etc.), or an IDE (PyCharm, VSCode, Eclipse) to develop and test your job’s code interactively you need to enable X11-forwarding from your client machine to speed then to the compute node. To do so:

  1. you need to run an X server on your client machine, such as,

    See https://www.concordia.ca/ginacody/aits/support/faq/xserver.html for details.

  2. verify your X connection was properly forwarded by printing the DISPLAY variable:

    echo $DISPLAY If it has no output, then your X forwarding is not on and you may need to re-login to Speed.

  3. Use the --x11 with salloc or srun:

    salloc ... --x11=first ...

  4. Once landed on a compute node, verify DISPLAY again.
  5. While running under scheduler, unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
  6. Launch your graphical application:

    module load the required version, then matlab, or abaqus cme, etc.

Here’s an example of starting PyCharm, of which we made a sample local installation. You can make a similar install under your own directory. If using VSCode, it’s currently only supported with the --no-sandbox option.

bash-3.2$ ssh -X speed (XQuartz xterm, PuTTY or MobaXterm have X11 forwarding too)
serguei@speed’s password:
[serguei@speed-submit ~] % echo $DISPLAY
localhost:14.0
[serguei@speed-submit ~] % srun -p ps --pty --x11=first --mem 4000 -t 0-06:00 /encs/bin/bash
bash-4.4$ echo $DISPLAY
localhost:77.0
bash-4.4$ hostname
speed-01.encs.concordia.ca
bash-4.4$ unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
bash-4.4$ /speed-scratch/nag-public/bin/pycharm.sh

PIC

Figure 4: PyCharm Starting up on a Speed Node

2.9 Scheduler Environment Variables

The scheduler presents a number of environment variables that can be used in your jobs. You can invoke env or printenv in your job to know what hose are (most begin with the prefix SLURM). Some of the more useful ones are:

In Figure 5 is a sample script, using some of these.

#!/encs/bin/tcsh 
 
#SBATCH --job-name=tmpdir      ## Give the job a name 
#SBATCH --mail-type=ALL        ## Receive all email type notifications 
#SBATCH --mail-user=$USER 
#SBATCH --chdir=./             ## Use currect directory as working directory 
#SBATCH --nodes=1 
#SBATCH --ntasks=1 
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=8      ## Request 8 cores 
#SBATCH --mem=32G              ## Assign 32G memory per node 
 
cd $TMPDIR 
mkdir input 
rsync -av $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/references/ input/ 
mkdir results 
srun STAR --inFiles $TMPDIR/input --parallel $SRUN_CPUS_PER_TASK --outFiles $TMPDIR/results 
rsync -av $TMPDIR/results/ $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/processed/
Figure 5: Source code for tmpdir.sh

2.10 SSH Keys For MPI

Some programs effect their parallel processing via MPI (which is a communication protocol). An example of such software is Fluent. MPI needs to have ‘passwordless login’ set up, which means SSH keys. In your NFS-mounted home directory:

2.11 Creating Virtual Environments

The following documentation is specific to the Speed HPC Facility at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science. Virtual environments typically instantiated via Conda or Python. Another option is Singularity detailed in Section 2.16.

2.11.1 Anaconda

To create an anaconda environment in your speed-scratch directory, use the prefix option when executing conda create. For example, to create an anaconda environment for a_user, execute the following at the command line:

conda create --prefix /speed-scratch/a_user/myconda

Note: Without the prefix option, the conda create command creates the environment in a_user’s home directory by default.

List Environments. To view your conda environments, type: conda info --envs

# conda environments:
#
base                  *  /encs/pkg/anaconda3-2019.07/root
                         /speed-scratch/a_user/myconda

Activate an Environment. Activate the environment speedscratcha_usermyconda as follows

conda activate /speed-scratch/a_user/myconda

After activating your environment, add pip to your environment by using

conda install pip

This will install pip and pip’s dependencies, including python, into the environment.

Important Note: pip (and pip3) are used to install modules from the python distribution while conda install installs modules from anaconda’s repository.

2.11.2 Python

Setting up a Python virtual environment is fairly straightforward. We have a simple example that use a Python virtual environment:

2.12 Example Job Script: Fluent

#!/encs/bin/tcsh 
 
#SBATCH --job-name=flu10000    ## Give the job a name 
#SBATCH --mail-type=ALL        ## Receive all email type notifications 
#SBATCH --mail-user=$USER@encs.concordia.ca 
#SBATCH --chdir=./             ## Use currect directory as working directory 
#SBATCH --nodes=1              ## Number of nodes to run on 
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=32   ## Number of cores 
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1      ## Number of MPI threads 
#SBATCH --mem=160G             ## Assign 160G memory per node 
 
date 
 
module avail ansys 
 
module load ansys/19.2/default 
cd $TMPDIR 
 
set FLUENTNODES = "‘scontrol␣show␣hostnames‘" 
set FLUENTNODES = ‘echo $FLUENTNODES | tr ’ ’ ’,’‘ 
 
date 
 
srun fluent 3ddp \ 
        -g -t$SLURM_NTASKS \ 
        -g-cnf=$FLUENTNODES \ 
        -i $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/fluentdata/info.jou > call.txt 
 
date 
 
srun rsync -av $TMPDIR/ $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/fluentparallel/ 
 
date
Figure 6: Source code for fluent.sh

The job script in Figure 6 runs Fluent in parallel over 32 cores. Of note, we have requested e-mail notifications (--mail-type), are defining the parallel environment for, fluent, with, -t$SLURM_NTASKS and -g-cnf=$FLUENTNODES (very important), and are setting $TMPDIR as the in-job location for the “moment” rfile.out file (in-job, because the last line of the script copies everything from $TMPDIR to a directory in the user’s NFS-mounted home). Job progress can be monitored by examining the standard-out file (e.g., slurm-249.out), and/or by examining the “moment” file in /disk/nobackup/<yourjob> (hint: it starts with your job-ID) on the node running the job. Caveat: take care with journal-file file paths.

2.13 Example Job: efficientdet

The following steps describing how to create an efficientdet environment on Speed, were submitted by a member of Dr. Amer’s research group.

pip install tensorflow==2.7.0
pip install lxml>=4.6.1
pip install absl-py>=0.10.0
pip install matplotlib>=3.0.3
pip install numpy>=1.19.4
pip install Pillow>=6.0.0
pip install PyYAML>=5.1
pip install six>=1.15.0
pip install tensorflow-addons>=0.12
pip install tensorflow-hub>=0.11
pip install neural-structured-learning>=1.3.1
pip install tensorflow-model-optimization>=0.5
pip install Cython>=0.29.13
pip install git+https://github.com/cocodataset/cocoapi.git#subdirectory=PythonAPI

2.14 Java Jobs

Jobs that call java have a memory overhead, which needs to be taken into account when assigning a value to --mem. Even the most basic java call, java -Xmx1G -version, will need to have, --mem=5G, with the 4-GB difference representing the memory overhead. Note that this memory overhead grows proportionally with the value of -Xmx. To give you an idea, when -Xmx has a value of 100G, --mem has to be at least 106G; for 200G, at least 211G; for 300G, at least 314G.

2.15 Scheduling On The GPU Nodes

The primary cluster has two GPU nodes, each with six Tesla (CUDA-compatible) P6 cards: each card has 2048 cores and 16GB of RAM. Though note that the P6 is mainly a single-precision card, so unless you need the GPU double precision, double-precision calculations will be faster on a CPU node.

Job scripts for the GPU queue differ in that they need this statement, which attaches either a single GPU, or, two GPUs, to the job:

#SBATCH --gpus=[1|2]

Once that your job script is ready, you can submit it to the GPU partition (queue) with:

sbatch -p pg ./<myscript>.sh

And you can query nvidia-smi on the node that is running your job with:

ssh <username>@speed[-05|-17|37-43] nvidia-smi

Status of the GPU queue can be queried with:

sinfo -p pg --long --Node

Very important note regarding TensorFlow and PyTorch: if you are planning to run TensorFlow and/or PyTorch multi-GPU jobs, do not use the tf.distribute and/or
torch.nn.DataParallel functions on speed-01,05,17, as they will crash the compute node (100% certainty). This appears to be the current hardware’s architecture’s defect. The workaround is to either manually effect GPU parallelisation (TensorFlow has an example on how to do this), or to run on a single GPU.

Important

Users without permission to use the GPU nodes can submit jobs to the pg partition, but those jobs will hang and never run. Their availability is seen with:

[serguei@speed-submit src] % sinfo -p pg --long --Node
Thu Oct 19 22:31:04 2023
NODELIST   NODES PARTITION       STATE CPUS    S:C:T MEMORY TMP_DISK WEIGHT AVAIL_FE REASON
speed-05       1        pg        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    gpu16 none
speed-17       1        pg     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    gpu16 UGE
speed-25       1        pg        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 none
speed-27       1        pg        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 none
[serguei@speed-submit src] % sinfo -p pt --long --Node
Thu Oct 19 22:32:39 2023
NODELIST   NODES PARTITION       STATE CPUS    S:C:T MEMORY TMP_DISK WEIGHT AVAIL_FE REASON
speed-37       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-38       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-39       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-40       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-41       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-42       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-43       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none

This status demonstrates that most are available (i.e., have not been requested as resources). To specifically request a GPU node, add, --gpus=[#GPUs], to your sbatch (statement/script) or salloc (statement) request. For example, sbatch -t 10 --mem=1G --gpus=1 -p pg ./tcsh.sh. You will see that this job has been assigned to one of the GPU nodes.

[serguei@speed-submit src] % squeue -p pg -o "%15N %.6D %7P %.11T %.4c %.8z %.6m %.8d %.6w %.8f %20G %20E"
NODELIST         NODES PARTITI       STATE MIN_    S:C:T MIN_ME MIN_TMP_  WCKEY FEATURES GROUP DEPENDENCY
speed-05             1 pg          RUNNING    1    *:*:*     1G        0 (null)   (null) 11929     (null)
[serguei@speed-submit src] % sinfo -p pg -o "%15N %.6D %7P %.11T %.4c %.8z %.6m %.8d %.6w %.8f %20G %20E"
NODELIST         NODES PARTITI       STATE CPUS    S:C:T MEMORY TMP_DISK WEIGHT AVAIL_FE GRES      REASON
speed-17             1 pg          drained   32   2:16:1 515490        0      1    gpu16 gpu:6        UGE
speed-05             1 pg            mixed   32   2:16:1 515490        0      1    gpu16 gpu:6       none
speed-[25,27]        2 pg             idle   32   2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 gpu:2       none

2.15.1 CUDA

When calling CUDA within job scripts, it is important to create a link to the desired CUDA libraries and set the runtime link path to the same libraries. For example, to use the cuda-11.5 libraries, specify the following in your Makefile.

-L/encs/pkg/cuda-11.5/root/lib64 -Wl,-rpath,/encs/pkg/cuda-11.5/root/lib64

In your job script, specify the version of gcc to use prior to calling cuda. For example: module load gcc/8.4 or module load gcc/9.3

2.15.2 Special Notes for sending CUDA jobs to the GPU Queue

Interactive jobs (Section 2.8) must be submitted to the GPU partition in order to compile and link. We have several versions of CUDA installed in:

/encs/pkg/cuda-11.5/root/
/encs/pkg/cuda-10.2/root/
/encs/pkg/cuda-9.2/root

For CUDA to compile properly for the GPU partition, edit your Makefile replacing usrlocalcuda with one of the above.

2.15.3 OpenISS Examples

These represent more comprehensive research-like examples of jobs for computer vision and other tasks with a lot longer runtime (a subject to the number of epochs and other parameters) derive from the actual research works of students and their theses. These jobs require the use of CUDA and GPUs. These examples are available as “native” jobs on Speed and as Singularity containers.

OpenISS and REID The example openiss-reid-speed.sh illustrates a job for a computer-vision based person re-identification (e.g., motion capture-based tracking for stage performance) part of the OpenISS project by Haotao Lai [10] using TensorFlow and Keras. The fork of the original repo [12] adjusted to to run on Speed is here:

and its detailed description on how to run it on Speed is in the README:

OpenISS and YOLOv3 The related code using YOLOv3 framework is in the the fork of the original repo [11] adjusted to to run on Speed is here:

Its example job scripts can run on both CPUs and GPUs, as well as interactively using TensorFlow:

The detailed description on how to run these on Speed is in the README at:

2.16 Singularity Containers

If the /encs software tree does not have a required software instantaneously available, another option is to run Singularity containers. We run EL7 flavor of Linux, and if some projects require Ubuntu or other distributions, there is a possibility to run that software as a container, including the ones translated from Docker.

The example lambdal-singularity.sh showcases an immediate use of a container built for the Ubuntu-based LambdaLabs software stack, originally built as a Docker image then pulled in as a Singularity container that is immediately available for use as that job example illustrates. The source material used for the docker image was our fork of their official repo: https://github.com/NAG-DevOps/lambda-stack-dockerfiles

NOTE: It is important if you make your own containers or pull from DockerHub, use your /speed-scratch/$USER directory as these images may easily consume gigs of space in your home directory and you’d run out of quota there very fast.

TIP: To check for your quota, and the corresponding commands to find big files, see: https://www.concordia.ca/ginacody/aits/encs-data-storage.html

We likewise built equivalent OpenISS (Section 2.15.3) containers from their Docker counter parts as they were used for teaching and research [14]. The images from https://github.com/NAG-DevOps/openiss-dockerfiles and their DockerHub equivalents https://hub.docker.com/u/openiss are found in the same public directory on /speed-scratch/nag-public as the LambdaLabs Singularity image. They all have .sif extension. Some of them can be ran in both batch or interactive mode, some make more sense to run interactively. They cover some basics with CUDA, OpenGL rendering, and computer vision tasks as examples from the OpenISS library and other libraries, including the base images that use different distros. We also include Jupyter notebook example with Conda support.

/speed-scratch/nag-public:

openiss-cuda-conda-jupyter.sif
openiss-cuda-devicequery.sif
openiss-opengl-base.sif
openiss-opengl-cubes.sif
openiss-opengl-triangle.sif
openiss-reid.sif
openiss-xeyes.sif

The currently recommended version of Singularity is singularity/3.10.4/default.

This section comprises an introduction to working with Singularity, its containers, and what can and cannot be done with Singularity on the ENCS infrastructure. It is not intended to be an exhaustive presentation of Singularity: the program’s authors do a good job of that here: https://www.sylabs.io/docs/. It also assumes that you have successfully installed Singularity on a user-managed/personal system (see next paragraph as to why).

Singularity containers are essentially either built from an existing container, or are built from scratch. Building from scratch requires a recipe file (think of like a Dockerfile), and the operation must be effected as root. You will not have root on the ENCS infrastructure, so any built-from-scratch containers must be created on a user-managed/personal system. Root-level permissions are also required (in some cases, essential; in others, for proper build functionality) for building from an existing container. Three types of Singularity containers can be built: file-system; sandbox; squashfs. The first two are “writable” (meaning that changes can persist after the Singularity session ends). File-system containers are built around the ext3 file system, and are a read-write “file”, sandbox containers are essentially a directory in an existing read-write space, and squashfs containers are a read-only compressed “file”. Note that file-system containers cannot be resized once built.

Note that the default build is a squashfs one. Also note what Singularity’s authors have to say about the builds, “A common workflow is to use the “sandbox” mode for development of the container, and then build it as a default (squashfs) Singularity image when done.” File-system containers are considered to be, “legacy”, at this point in time. When built, a very small overhead is allotted to a file-system container (think, MB), and that cannot be changed.

Probably for the most of your workflows you might find there is a Docker container exists for your tasks, in this case you can use the docker pull function of Singularity as a part of you virtual environment setup as an interactive job allocation:

salloc --gpus=1 -n8 -t60
cd /speed-scratch/$USER/
singularity pull openiss-cuda-devicequery.sif docker://openiss/openiss-cuda-devicequery
INFO:    Converting OCI blobs to SIF format
INFO:    Starting build...

This method can be used for converting Docker containers directly on Speed. On GPU nodes make sure to pass on the --nv flag to Singularity, so its containers could access the GPUs. See the linked example.

3 Conclusion

The cluster is, “first come, first served”, until it fills, and then job position in the queue is based upon past usage. The scheduler does attempt to fill gaps, though, so sometimes a single-core job of lower priority will schedule before a multi-core job of higher priority, for example.

3.1 Important Limitations

3.2 Tips/Tricks

3.3 Use Cases

A History

A.1 Acknowledgments

A.2 Migration from UGE to SLURM

For long term users who started off with Grid Engine here are some resources to make a transition and mapping to the job submission process.

A.3 Phases

Brief summary of Speed evolution phases.

A.3.1 Phase 4

Phase 4 had 7 SuperMicro servers with 4x A100 80GB GPUs each added, dubbed as “SPEED2”. We also moved from Grid Engine to SLURM.

A.3.2 Phase 3

Phase 3 had 4 vidpro nodes added from Dr. Amer totalling 6x P6 and 6x V100 GPUs added.

A.3.3 Phase 2

Phase 2 saw 6x NVIDIA Tesla P6 added and 8x more compute nodes. The P6s replaced 4x of FirePro S7150.

A.3.4 Phase 1

Phase 1 of Speed was of the following configuration:

B Frequently Asked Questions

B.1 Where do I learn about Linux?

All Speed users are expected to have a basic understanding of Linux and its commonly used commands.

Software Carpentry

Software Carpentry provides free resources to learn software, including a workshop on the Unix shell. https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/

Udemy

There are a number of Udemy courses, including free ones, that will assist you in learning Linux. Active Concordia faculty, staff and students have access to Udemy courses such as Linux Mastery: Master the Linux Command Line in 11.5 Hours is a good starting point for beginners. Visit https://www.concordia.ca/it/services/udemy.html to learn how Concordians may access Udemy.

B.2 How to use the “bash shell” on Speed?

This section describes how to use the “bash shell” on Speed. Review Section 2.1.2 to ensure that your bash environment is set up.

B.2.1 How do I set bash as my login shell?

In order to set your login shell to bash on Speed, your login shell on all GCS servers must be changed to bash. To make this change, create a ticket with the Service Desk (or email help at concordia.ca) to request that bash become your default login shell for your ENCS user account on all GCS servers.

B.2.2 How do I move into a bash shell on Speed?

To move to the bash shell, type bash at the command prompt. For example:

[speed-submit] [/home/a/a_user] > bash
bash-4.4$ echo $0
bash

Note how the command prompt changed from [speed-submit] [/home/a/a_user] > to bash-4.4$ after entering the bash shell.

B.2.3 How do I use the bash shell in an interactive session on Speed?

If you use one of the below commands (make sure job request settings such as memory, cores, etc are set), they will allocate your interactive job sessions with bash as a shell on the compute nodes:

B.2.4 How do I run scripts written in bash on Speed?

To execute bash scripts on Speed:

  1. Ensure that the shebang of your bash job script is #!/encs/bin/bash
  2. Use the sbatch command to submit your job script to the scheduler.

The Speed GitHub contains a sample bash job script.

B.3 How to resolve “Disk quota exceeded” errors?

B.3.1 Probable Cause

The “Disk quota exceeded” Error occurs when your application has run out of disk space to write to. On Speed this error can be returned when:

  1. Your NFS-provided home is full and cannot be written to. You can verify this using quota and bigfiles commands.
  2. The /tmp directory on the speed node your application is running on is full and cannot be written to.

B.3.2 Possible Solutions

  1. Use the --chdir job script option to set the directory that the job script is submitted from the job working directory. The job working directory is the directory that the job will write output files in.
  2. The use local disk space is generally recommended for IO intensive operations. However, as the size of /tmp on speed nodes is 1TB it can be necessary for scripts to store temporary data elsewhere. Review the documentation for each module called within your script to determine how to set working directories for that application. The basic steps for this solution are:

In the above example, $USER is an environment variable containing your ENCS username.

B.3.3 Example of setting working directories for COMSOL

In the above example, $USER is an environment variable containing your ENCS username.

B.3.4 Example of setting working directories for Python Modules

By default when adding a python module the /tmp directory is set as the temporary repository for files downloads. The size of the /tmp directory on speed-submit is too small for pytorch. To add a python module

In the above example, $USER is an environment variable containing your ENCS username.

B.4 How do I check my job’s status?

When a job with a job id of 1234 is running or terminated, the status of that job can be tracked using ‘sacct -j 1234’. squeue -j 1234 can show while the job is sitting in the queue as well. Long term statistics on the job after its terminated can be found using sstat -j 1234 after slurmctld purges it its tracking state into the database.

B.5 Why is my job pending when nodes are empty?

B.5.1 Disabled nodes

It is possible that one or a number of the Speed nodes are disabled. Nodes are disabled if they require maintenance. To verify if Speed nodes are disabled, see if they are in a draining or drained state:

[serguei@speed-submit src] % sinfo --long --Node
Thu Oct 19 21:25:12 2023
NODELIST   NODES PARTITION       STATE CPUS    S:C:T MEMORY TMP_DISK WEIGHT AVAIL_FE REASON
speed-01       1        pa        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu16 none
speed-03       1        pa        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 none
speed-05       1        pg        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    gpu16 none
speed-07       1       ps*       mixed 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-08       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-09       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-10       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-11       1       ps*        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-12       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-15       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-16       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-17       1        pg     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    gpu16 UGE
speed-19       1       ps*        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-20       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-21       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-22       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-23       1       ps*        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-24       1       ps*        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-25       1        pg        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 none
speed-25       1        pa        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 none
speed-27       1        pg        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 none
speed-27       1        pa        idle 32     2:16:1 257458        0      1    gpu32 none
speed-29       1       ps*        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-30       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-31       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-32       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-33       1       ps*        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-34       1       ps*        idle 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 none
speed-35       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-36       1       ps*     drained 32     2:16:1 515490        0      1    cpu32 UGE
speed-37       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-38       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-39       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-40       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-41       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-42       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none
speed-43       1        pt        idle 256    2:64:2 980275        0      1 gpu20,mi none

Note which nodes are in the state of drained. Why the state is drained can be found in the reason column.

Your job will run once an occupied node becomes availble or the maintenance has been completed and the disabled nodes have a state of idle.

B.5.2 Error in job submit request.

It is possible that your job is pending, because the job requested resources that are not available within Speed. To verify why job id 1234 is not running, execute ‘sacct -j 1234’. A summary of the reasons is available via the squeue command.

C Sister Facilities

Below is a list of resources and facilities similar to Speed at various capacities. Depending on your research group and needs, they might be available to you. They are not managed by HPC/NAG of AITS, so contact their respective representatives.

References

[1]   3DS. Abaqus. [online], 2019–2021. https://www.3ds.com/products-services/simulia/products/abaqus/.

[2]   ANSYS. FLUENT. [online], 2000–2012. http://www.ansys.com/Products/Simulation+Technology/Fluid+Dynamics/ANSYS+FLUENT.

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