> CECI clusters¶
The CÉCI consortium gathers the supercomputing centers of the five French-speaking universities in Belgium. Each university hosts a cluster that is shared with all users of all member universities. The clusters are designed to be complementary both in terms of hardware and usage policies.
Here at UCLouvain we host the Lemaitre4 cluster. All documentation regarding Lemaitre will be found on the CÉCI documentation website.
As the name implies, Lemaitre4 is the fourth generation of Lemaitre cluster. Below is a summary of the cluster resources.
[dfr@lm4-f001 ~]$ sinfo
Partitions:
batch* (2days)
Nodes:
#Nodes Partition CPU S:C:T CPUS Memory GPUs
40 batch* AMD,Genoa,9534 2:64:2 256 748G (null)
Filesystems:
Filesystem quota
$HOME 100G
$GLOBALSCRATCH unlimited
$CECIHOME 100.0GB
$GLOBALSCRATCH unlimited # 318TB available
More information is available on the CÉCI website.
Connecting¶
Clusters are accessed with a CÉCI-provided login and SSH key. UCLouvain users connecting to CÉCI clusters must do so using an intermediate SSH gateway called gwceci.cism.ucl.ac.be with the same login and key. Note that you can use the gateway only as a ProxyJump host.
All this is explained in detail in the CÉCI documentation.
Transfering files¶
File upload and download can be done through SSH with command-line tools such as scp, rsync, or sftp which will work out of the box provided the SSH configuration is correct. Refer to the CÉCI documentation for details.
Tools with a graphical user interface, such as can also be used, for instance:
or any other tool that supports an SSH configuration that involves a proxy jump and an SSH agent.
Submitting jobs¶
All clusters run the Slurm workload manager/scheduler. Users typically write a Bash submission script containing both resource requests and commands to run, and submit it to the scheduler. The job is then run on resources exclusively allocated to the job. The job output is written to file, and, when it is completed, an email is sent to notify the user.
A detailed introduction is available on the CÉCI website, and a video can be found on our Youtube channel.