Getting an Interactive Session on a Gizmo Node
Edit this Page via GitHub Comment by Filing an Issue Have Questions? Ask them here.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
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Node An individual server in a collection of networked servers that make up a computing cluster.
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Shell A command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems.
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Scripts A script is set of commands that are executed by an operating system or application.
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Session A temporary and interactive information interchange between two or more communicating devices, or between a computer and user.
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Workload manager Software that coordinates job submission to nodes on a cluster.
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Slurm A type of workload manager used at the Fred Hutch’s gizmo computing cluster.
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HutchNet ID A user ID specific to the Fred Hutch.
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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.