Getting Started

Getting started​

​When you get your new account you should first take a look at the BMRC help pages​.

Access to their facilities is either via SSH to a set of machines cluster1.bmrc.ox.ac.uk, cluster2.bmrc.ox.ac.uk, cluster3.bmrc.ox.ac.uk and cluster4.bmrc.ox.ac.uk or via WIN/BMRC's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure running on one of our dedicated servers.

The cluster1/cluster2 machines must not​ be used for any processing, they are purely for you to manipulate your files, upload/download data and submit tasks to the queues and to gain access to other resources. You may use the VDI hosts for any compute purpose.

On first connecting your SSH client will ask if you trust the remote server - check that the 'fingerprint' given matches these values - your version of SSH will decide whether you see the RSA, ECDSA or ED25519 fingerprint.

Instuctions on getting started with your BMRC account, including WIN specific details are on our BMRC usage pages with instructions on using the BMRC cluster can be found on our BMRC cluster page​ along with details on the compute resources at BMRC​.

Setting up your account

​Once you have an account on their system you should add some WIN specific settings to your account​, you can do this with:

​/well/win/software/config/setup_win

After running this command, please log out and back in. You will then have access to our WIN specific software modules - see Modules​. An important module is fsl_sub, use:

​module add fsl_sub

​to activate (you might want to put this line after the WIN Config section in your .bash_profile).

For legacy software, you may need to add the previous software build tree:

module use -a /apps/eb/2020b/skylake/modules/all

before you can find the associated modules.

Storage locations

​User home folders (at /users/<groupname>/<username>...) are intentionally limited in size so do not store any project data in this location. Users have a dedicated folder within their group at /well/<groupname>/users/<username> - you should store all data and files there.

Graphical Programs

​WIN Centre users have access to a web-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure that can be used to run graphical software on any of our cluster nodes. This is to be preferred over X11 forwarding over SSH, particularly when accessing from a non-University ethernet network and/or long running tasks.

Submitting to the Cluster​

For information on submitting jobs to the CPU or GPU cluster nodes see our BMRC cluster pages.