GUI access to the popular statistics application STATA is now available via Open OnDemand on the HOPPER Cluster. There is a limit of 5 concurrent Stata sessions as the license is shared with the Campus Citrix Virtual Computing and Patriot Virtual Computing clusters run by ITS.
Author: Alastair Neil
Categories
ORC resources suffering from widespread network disruption
- Post author By Alastair Neil
- Post date November 9, 2021
Network access to ORC resources is currently disrupted due to configuration changes made to integrate new network infrastructure hardware. The HOPPER and ARGO clusters, Virtual host systems and network data shares may be inaccessible, or only intermittently available until the problem is resolved. Engineers are working with the equipment providers support team to diagnose and resolve the issue. We appreciate this is very disruptive and apologize for the inconvenience.
When it is available, further information regarding the estimated down time will be posted here and sent to the ARGO-USERS mailing list.
Update 11/9/2021 22:50. Engineers from Dell believe they have resolved the connectivity issues on the Dell hardware. However, as of now the clusters remain unresponsive. This may be due to storage server problems caused by the network outage or with campus networking. We will be engaging with GMU IT support in the morning to perform additional analysis of the issue. We hope to have all clusters and systems available before end-of-day Wednesday 11/10/2021.
Update 11/10/2021 12:30. All issues have been resolved and the HOPPER and ARGO clusters are available.
Virginia Women in HPC – Inaugural Event
- Post author By Alastair Neil
- Post date September 28, 2021
VIRGINIA WOMEN IN HPC
INAUGURAL EVENT
WHEN
October 6th
1:00pm – 2:00pm
WHAT
We are proud to announce the founding of Virginia’s first Women in High-Performance Computing (WHPC) program. Join Virginia WHPC for its inaugural event featuring inspiring lightning talks by female faculty of the Commonwealth sharing and discussing how HPC has facilitated their scientific research and professional careers.
Topic: How does HPC help with your scientific research — Faculty perspectives
Speakers:
- Julie Quinn – University of Virginia
- Jenna Cann – George Mason University
- Grace Chiu – William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Registration Link: http://HTTPS://TINYURL.COM/VA-WHPC-OCT2021
THIS VIRTUAL EVENT IS JOINTLY HOSTED BY VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY, VIRGINIA TECH, WILLIAM & MARY, UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND, AND RESEARCH COMPUTING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.
OKLAHOMA SUPERCOMPUTING SYMPOSIUM 2021
- Post author By Alastair Neil
- Post date September 7, 2021
The annual Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium will be held as a free virtual event this year.
The meeting agenda with registration information can be found here: http://www.oscer.ou.edu/Symposium2021/agenda.html
SPEAKERS WILL INCLUDE:
Margaret Martonosi – Assistant Director, Computer and Information Science & Engineering National Science Foundation
Lynne Parker – Director, National AI Initiative Office. Assistant Director of OSTP for Artificial Intelligence Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) The White House
Dan Stanzione – Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center University of Texas Austin
Thirumalai (Venky) Venkatesan – Director, Center for Quantum Research and Technology University of Oklahoma
Announcing the Hopper Cluster (Hopper)
- Post author By Alastair Neil
- Post date June 23, 2021
Announcing the Hopper Cluster (Hopper)
The ORC would like to invite you to use Hopper its new high performance compute cluster. Hopper is named in honor of the late rear admiral Grace Hopper, a computing pioneer and local resident. All new ORC cluster accounts will be created and activated on Hopper by default. However, existing Argo cluster account holders should send an email to orchelp@gmu.edu to request activation of their account on Hopper.
Hopper currently has a total of 70 compute nodes each node with 48 cores (Intel Cascade Lake) and 188 GB of available memory. Currently, 28 nodes and the GPU node are freely available for all users. The remaining nodes may also be used but jobs will be subject to preemption by jobs run by the node’s sponsors. There is one Nvidia DGX GPU node with 128 CPU cores (AMD EPYC/Milan), 1 TB of memory, and 8xA100 GPUs.
A large expansion of Hopper is planned for the Fall of 2021 which will add a substantial number of compute and GPU nodes including very large memory nodes with up to 4 TB of memory. Users who require memory address spaces greater that 180 GB will need to continue to use the Argo cluster until the new large memory nodes become available in Hopper.
The Hopper cluster is configured in a similar but not identical fashion to Argo. The software modules are organized differently and there are differences in the partition names, defaults, and versions of software available. Please review the documentation linked below for more detailed information on the differences.
You may log in to Hopper using “ssh <UserID>@hopper.orc.gmu.edu,” where “<UserID>“ is your GMU NetID, use your GMU campus password when prompted. Home, scratch, and project directories will be mounted in the same locations as on Argo. Let us know if there are any “groups” directories you need to access, or if there are specific software packages and versions you require that are not available. The partition/queue structure on Hopper is summarized in the table below:
| Partition | Time Limit (D-H:M) | Description | ARGO Equivalent |
| debug | 0-01:00 | Intended for quick tests | |
| interactive | 0-12:00 | Interactive jobs (Open OnDemand) | |
| normal | 3-00:00 | default | all-LoPri, all-HiPri, bigmem-HiPri, bigmem-LoPri, all-long, bigmem-long |
| contrib* | 6-00:00 | CDS_q, COS_q, CS_q, EMH_q | |
| gpuq | 1-00:00 | GPU node access | gpuq |
*NOTE: Being a contributor on Argo does not automatically grant access to the contrib partition on Hopper. All users may submit jobs to the contrib partition on Hopper, however, their jobs may be preempted and killed by a contributor’s job at any time. We recommend that non-contributor users who submit to the contrib partition ensure their jobs use some form of checkpointing. Contact orchelp@gmu.edu if you need help implementing checkpointing in your jobs.
Open OnDemand
We would also like users to try our new Open OnDemand (OOD) Server, which enables launching interactive apps including RStudio, Jupyter Lab, MATLAB and Mathematica, or a Linux graphical desktop through a web interface. These interactive sessions can be used for up to 12 hours. From a web browser, login to https://ondemand.orc.gmu.edu using your GMU username and credentials to access the OOD server. Please let us know of any problems you encounter, and any applications you would like to be able to use via Open OnDemand.
Documentation
Please refer to the following links for current documentation on Hopper:
- Getting Started: http://wiki.orc.gmu.edu/mkdocs/Hopper_Quick_Start_Guide/
- Navigating Modules on Hopper: http://wiki.orc.gmu.edu/mkdocs/Navigating_Lmod_Modules/
- Running GPU jobs on the DGX A100: http://wiki.orc.gmu.edu/mkdocs/DGX_A100_User_Guide/
- Open OnDemand on Hopper: http://wiki.orc.gmu.edu/mkdocs/open_ondemand_on_Hopper/
- Comparing ARGO to HOPPER: http://wiki.orc.gmu.edu/mkdocs/ARGO_vs_HOPPER/
If you have any questions about any aspect of the new Hopper cluster, please send an email to orchelp@gmu.edu.
ARGO Scratch File system migration – Cluster unavailable in the AM 03/13/2021
- Post author By Alastair Neil
- Post date March 12, 2021
There is a planned interruption to the availability of the Argo cluster.
On the morning of 03/13/2021, the scratch filesystem will be migrated to new hardware. The file system must be quiescent during the data transfer so the entire ARGO cluster will be unavailable from 5 am for a few hours. All partitions are being drained. Jobs will start running again
by the afternoon.