Getting an Interactive Session on a Gizmo Node

This pathway will get you an interactive, login session on a gizmo compute node. This can be useful when developing and prototyping larger compute jobs and when your tasks exceed the capacity of the rhino login nodes.

Pre-requisites

A desktop computer, access to the internet, a good text editor.

If you are unfamiliar with any of these terms or subjects, hover over them to find more information.

• Interactive sessions on a login node

• Node An individual server in a collection of networked servers that make up a computing cluster.

• Shell A command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems.

• Scripts A script is set of commands that are executed by an operating system or application.

• Session A temporary and interactive information interchange between two or more communicating devices, or between a computer and user.

• Workload manager Software that coordinates job submission to nodes on a cluster.

• Slurm A type of workload manager used at the Fred Hutch’s gizmo computing cluster.
  

• HutchNet ID A user ID specific to the Fred Hutch.

• rhino The login node (actually several nodes) of the Fred Hutch high performance computing cluster.

• gizmo The name of the Fred Hutch high performance computing cluster’s computing nodes.

Steps

Start a Session on a Login Node

Follow these instructions to get login session on a rhino node

Familiarize Yourself with Slurm

Slurm is the workload manager for the gizmo computing cluster. Review the documentation for basic information about how SLURM works.

As this is a job, it will be subject to allocation policies that can cause delays in starting this interactive session- refer to “Why is my Job not Running” for more information.

“Grab” a Node

“Grabbing” a node will launch a new login session on a cluster node. For this we have the custom command grabnode. This will allocate resources on a cluster node and start a session there.

Where to go from here

Convert Your Interactive Tasks to a Job

If you find yourself repeatedly running the same or similar commands in a grabnode session, it’s likely time to look at moving this to a job.