Latest OxCIN IT news
Upcoming changes to the IT infrastructure
To better understand how WIN researchers use the provided compute facilities for the purposes of planning changes and future services we would appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to complete our survey on use of our HPC facilities.
Changes to interactive session launching and restrictions
OOD changes
We have modified the behaviour of the interactive desktop/MATLAB etc sessions on the cluster based on the last few months of experience with the system. The changes are to ensure fairer share of the resources and to avoid sessions being requested that cannot be fulfilled by OOD.
All interactive sessions have new launcher pages that default to our recommended ‘normal’ settings for memory and CPU. Unless you have a very specific reason to request more, we would like you to stick with this setting. If you do need more RAM or CPUs then there is an advanced option which allows you to specify these. Please note, the more you ask for the longer the wait for the session is likely to be. We are also now limiting the total memory that these large sessions can occupy to try to always be able to provide desktops to those that are OK with the standard session.
You may now specify fractions of a day for session duration, so if you only need it for a couple of hours you can request 0.1 days, etc.
The GPU selection is now a drop-down, and changes made here will influence other settings, e.g. session duration/GPU quantity as required by our cluster settings.
We no longer allow the requesting of more than two of the desktop, MATLAB, Jupyter or RStudio sessions – you will see an error message if you try to submit a third session. Please do not run more than one desktop session, but it is fine to run a desktop and one of the other types.
Finally, an issue with memory over-request by the Desktop session launcher and fsl_sub (when RAM details were provided) has been identified and fixed.
FMRIB has a new compute cluster - read all about it
New Cluster Details
The Jalapeno cluster will be retired in early summer 2024 and its replacement is now available for early use.
This new cluster uses new access technologies to simplify the use of graphical software and updates the software to significantly more modern versions of the operating system and tools. The underlying hardware has been completely refreshed, bringing in up-to-date CPUs and NVIDIA A30 and H100 GPUs.
Slides from recent WIP session.
Remote access
Whilst the cluster continues to allow SSH access:
it no longer supports remote X11 displays or the TigerVNC system for graphical access. Instead it offers a web browser based system called Open On Demand, which inspired the new name 'Ood'.
The new compute cluster uses SLURM to submit jobs, fsl_sub remains available, and other than a change to the names of the cluster queues (or preferably a switch to -T <time in minutes> -R <memory in GB> style submission).
Queues
File transfer
File transfers from locations outside of FMRIB can now be achieved via sftp.fmrib.ox.ac.uk (instead of jalapeno.fmrib.ox.ac.uk), or through the OOD file transfer pages.
Software
The new software stack is managed and distributed by a new system - environment module names may have changed, so you may need to update scripts/shell profiles. The old locations of /opt/fmrib and /usr/local/fmrib are not available on the new cluster. If you have these paths baked into scripts they will need to replaced with the equivalent module add command. For example if your .bash_profile references the Conda installed in /opt/fmrib then you will need to replace this with one of the modules for the new Conda base software.
We have also simplified the shell profiles (what configures your login session) - see our shell customisation page.
Other currently unsupported features
At present Ood does not support the user archive system, so archives and retrievals should continue to be carried out on Jalapeno.