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Using the MPCDF Systems

For this course, resources are provided at the MPCDF (Max Planck Computing and Data Facility), the central computing center of the Max Planck Society.

Connecting to MPCDF systems via a gateway

The compute resources at the MPCDF run Linux, and login is only possible via SSH in combination with two-factor authentication (see below). Any modern operating system (Linux, MacOS, Windows 10) provides an SSH client which is typically invoked via the ssh command from a terminal. To access a system at the MPCDF from the public Internet it is necessary to log into one of the gateway machines first, and then log from the gateway system into the target system.

You can connect to the gateway machine gatezero.mpcdf.mpg.de and then further to HPC systems. If you connect for the very first time, you will get a warning that the host’s authenticity cannot be verified. Provided that you can find the presented “fingerprint” in the list below, it is safe to answer with “yes” to continue connecting:

In order to connect to the gateway machine via ssh, you need to setup two-factor authentication (2FA, see https://docs.mpcdf.mpg.de/faq/2fa.html). For this, the following steps are needed:

ssh config made easy

In order to avoid typing in your password repeatedly, you can configure a ControlMaster setup for ssh (see https://docs.mpcdf.mpg.de/faq/2fa.html-do-i-have-to-type-in-an-otp-every-time-i-access-the-secured-systems). The following snippet can be added to ~/.ssh/config and should work for Linux and MacOS (replace YOUR_USER_NAME with your user name):

# Correctly resolve short names of gateway machines and HPC nodes
Match originalhost gate*,cobra,raven
    CanonicalDomains mpcdf.mpg.de
    CanonicalizeFallbackLocal no
    CanonicalizeHostname yes

# Keep a tunnel open for the day when accessing the gate machines
Match canonical host gate*
    User YOUR_USER_NAME
    Compression yes
    ServerAliveInterval 120
    ControlMaster auto
    ControlPersist 10h
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%C

# Keep a tunnel open for the day when accessing the HPC nodes
Match canonical host cobra*,raven*
    User YOUR_USER_NAME
    Compression yes
    ControlMaster auto
    ControlPersist 10h
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%C
    - OpenSSH >=7.3
    ProxyJump gatezero
    - OpenSSH <=7.2
    -ProxyCommand ssh -W %h:%p gatezero

Connect to the supercomputer

We will use the supercomputer cobra in this tutorial, so you can use ssh cobra to connect via gatezero to the login node of cobra.

More information on cobra can be found at https://docs.mpcdf.mpg.de/doc/computing/cobra-user-guide.html

So please login to cobra. You will find your home directory at /u/YOUR_USER_NAME , which is on one of two fast parallel file systems (GPFS). For the purposes of this course, you can store data and run simulations under this folder. For production runs with serious I/O, please use the ptmp file system under /ptmp/YOUR_USER_NAME because it is larger and more powerful. Be aware that files that have not been accessed for more than 12 weeks are deleted on ptmp.

Software environment

The software stack on cobra is available via environment modules (https://docs.mpcdf.mpg.de/doc/computing/software/environment-modules.html).

To manage the plethora of software packages resulting from all the relevant combinations of compilers and MPI libraries, we have decided to organize the environment module system for accessing these packages in a natural hierarchical manner. Compilers (gcc, intel) are located on the uppermost level, depending libraries (e.g., MPI) on the second level, more depending libraries on a third level. This means that not all the modules are visible initially: only after loading a compiler module, will the modules depending on this become available. Similarly, loading an MPI module in addition will make the modules depending on the MPI library available.

In case you know the name of the module you wish to load, but you are not sure about the available versions or what dependencies need to be loaded first, you can try to use the ‘find-module’ command. This tool searches for the MODULENAME string through a list of all installed modules:

find-module MODULENAME

Many software packages, such as octopus, are available as modules. Please run find-module octopus to find all octopus modules and the compiler and MPI modules you might need to load in order to make a specific version available.

From version 12 on, Octopus is self-contained. For previous versions, you need to load the compiler, etc. beforehand.

Three modules of octopus are available for combinations of compiler and MPI packages (here for version 12):

To load the default version of octopus/12, run:

module purge
module load octopus/12

Now, octopus is available in the path, so you can confirm the octopus version with

oct-help -v

This should print out the version of octopus:

octopus 12 (git commit )