Comments on Responses to Survey May 2023
Thank you to everyone who responded to the GACRC's Service Satisfaction Survey sent on May 8th, 2023. We value all the feedback received and we will take those into consideration as we work to improve our services and resources. Below we provide some comments and answers to common questions or requests made in the survey responses we received so far.
Would like to see more CPUs and GPUs added to Sapelo2
Since the beginning of 2022, we have added a total of 142 new compute nodes representing an investment of $2.4M. These nodes add a total of 16,512 cores, 84TB of RAM memory, and 32 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
From a Slurm partition perspective, the following presents a breakdown of these new compute nodes:
| Partition Names | Number of compute nodes added | Node configuration |
|---|---|---|
| batch, batch_30d | 120 | 128 cores & 512GB of RAM |
| highmem_p, highmem_30d_p | 12 | 32 cores & 1,024GB of RAM |
| highmem_p, highmem_30d_p | 2 | 128 cores & 1,024GB of RAM |
| gpu_p, gpu_30d_p | 8 | 64 cores, 1,024GB of RAM & 4x NVIDIA A100 (80GB) GPUs |
Would like to see a storage expansion and upgrade
GACRC purchased a new Lustre storage device that was delivered recently. This device represents a significant upgrade from our current Lustre storage device that serves the /scratch and /work file systems. Once this system is configured and tested, we will migrate the data from the old device. The upgrade is both in storage capacity and in the file access speed for the /scratch and /work file systems.
How to use the Open OnDemand interface to run software not available yet as an interactive app in OOD
Some software packages installed on Sapelo2 have a graphical user interface (GUI) through which users can interact with the program. A subset of these programs are installed as interactive apps in the Open OnDemand (OOD) interface. Software that are not installed as an interactive app can still be run via the OOD interface, from an X Desktop Session on Sapelo2, and have the GUI display on the user's local machine.
For example, SeaDAS and Geneious Prime (a commercial software) are installed on Sapelo2 and can be run via the Open OnDemand (OOD) interface. Although there is no interactive app for these now, you can run them and use their GUI in OOD from an X Desktop Session on Sapelo2.
Steps:
1. Start a web browser on your local machine and point it to https://ondemand.gacrc.uga.edu
2. Click on "Interactive Apps" and select "X Desktop Session on Sapelo2"
3. Choose the partition (e.g. batch) and the resources needed for the job. Click Launch
4. Once the X Desktop Session on Sapelo2 goes to a Running state, click on the "Launch X Desktop Session on Sapelo2" box to start it.
5. In the desktop that opens, start a Terminal
6. In the Terminal, load the module for the program that you wish to run. For example
module load Geneious_Prime/2023.0.4
or
module load SeaDAS/8.3.0
7. You can then run the program and the graphical front end will open in your X Desktop session. For example, start Geneious Prime with
Geneious_Prime
or start seadas with
seadas
GACRC does not have licenses for many commercial packages. If your group or Department/College have licenses for a commercial software package that you wish to use (e.g. SAS, Omics Box) and that is compatible with the Linux OS running on the cluster, we can install it on Sapelo2 and make it available to the group(s) who acquired the licenses. These programs would be accessible via the OOD interface as well.
File transfer options
We recommend using Globus for file transfer whenever possible, as it is secure, faster than SCP/SFTP, and it provides data verification by default. Documentation on how to use Globus is available at https://wiki.gacrc.uga.edu/wiki/Globus. There is also a video in our Kaltura channel that introduces the basic features of Globus (https://kaltura.uga.edu/media/t/1_vlprwoc7/176125031).
Other file transfer programs, such as WinSCP, FileZilla, scp, rsync, etc. can also be used. When using these programs to transfer files to Sapelo2, please connect to the xfer.gacrc.uga.edu host. If you are transferring files between GACRC and storage outside of UGA, we recommend connecting to the xfer node without connecting to the UGA VPN first (faster transfer speed). For more information, please see Transferring Files.
It is possible to download data from the cloud (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, etc) directly onto Sapelo2 storage. A good option is to use rclone on the xfer nodes. Their documentation can be found at https://rclone.org/docs/