Frequently-asked questions about HPC3 and CRSP
1. HPC3
1.1. General
- How do I acknowledge RCIC?
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Please see home page
- Is there a description that can be used in grant applications?
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Please see RCIC description
1.2. Policies
- Who defined the policy?
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The HPC3 subcommittee of the RCIC advisory committee crafted the initial policy.
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The RCIC Advisory committee approved the policy
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- Does this sharing cause problems with granting agencies?
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We don’t believe so. The condo conversion factor (0.95) essentially enables an owner to turn around and spend their converted hours on their owned hardware. The 5% reductions is a rational estimate of lack of availability of hardware when accounting for software maintenance, reboots, and other downtime. Grants should purchase the hardware capacity they require. Not more.
- I don’t have any funds to purchase cycles or buy hardware, can I use HPC3?
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Yes, if you are faculty member, you have granted cycles that are yours to use anyway you see fit for research. There is also the “free” queue, where jobs are not charged.
- If I purchase core-hours, is overhead charged?
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We are actively working with UCI financial office to see if we can establish a rate that reduces the financial impact of overhead on recharged-cycles.
1.3. Accounting
- How do I prevent my grad student from draining my account before I know about it?
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RCIC will allow you to set up charge limits for any particular user. If students hit their limits, they ask you for more, or use the free queue.
- Will HPC3 allow long-running (multiday/multiweek) jobs?
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Yes. It is clear that substantial community of researchers requires this feature.
- How does core-hour accounting impact long-running jobs?
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It really doesn’t. Slurm will not start the job unless there is enough credit to start the job. For example, a job is submitted with a requirements of 16 core-weeks will not start unless an account has 16 x 24 x 7 = 2688 core hours.
- I can’t submit jobs to GPU partition, is there something wrong with my account?
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Nothing is wrong, you simply need to have a separate GPU account to submit jobs to GPU partition. GPU accounts are not automatically given to everyone, your faculty adviser can request a GPU lab account. For example, a PI panteater will have a PANTEATER_LAB account for CPU jobs and PANTEATER_LAB_GPU account for GPU jobs.
2. Storage
2.1. General
- I have to store many files, some are pretty large. Where do I do this?
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Depending on your lab affiliation and how much space your lab has purchased you may have an access to personal and group-access areas in CRSP and BeeGFS filesystems. See BeeGFS HOWTOS and CRSP HOWTOS for information where to store and how to check quotas.
- How do I backup important files?
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It depends on what filesystem you are using. Your $HOME and CRSP’s HOME and LAB areas have automatic snapshots, you don’t need to do anything special. Please read HOME howtos and CRSP howtos that explain what the snapshots do and how long they are active. For BeeGFS (DFS) you can use selective backup.
2.2. Files transfer
- How do I transfer files from a remote server to/from my directory?
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Please see data transfer section.
- How do I use Filezilla with DUO?
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Please see FileZilla with DUO section
2.3. BeeGFS
2.3.1. Allocation/Recharge
- What are allocations for BeeGFS ?
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Users have access to the private and group-shared areas on BeeGFS. UCI Faculty members can have low-cost recharge allocation(s) to fulfill their needs. Please see BeeGFS allocations
- How do I purchase more BeeGFS space?
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Please see how to purchase more BeeGFS storage
2.4. CRSP
2.4.1. Allocation/Recharge
- Exactly who entitled to baseline allocation?
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All ladder faculty and any UCI employee who can serve as PI or Co-PI on an extramural grant.
- Can the recharge be used to expand my baseline allocation?
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You will always have your baseline allocation and you can use recharge to buy more space. For example, if you were to purchase 10TB for 1 year ($600) and add it to your baseline, you will have 11TB of allocated space. Please send a request to hpc-support@uci.edu telling us how much space you need (TB) and for how long (years). Please see recharge pricing.
- How do I purchase more space?
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Please see how to purchase more CRSP storage
- Can I expand space more than once?
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Yes. We track when each of your space allocations expire and recharge appropriately. Multiple purchases can be used to expand your space.
- Can I grant access to my storage to others at UCI?
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Yes. Under your control, you can add people (by the UCINetID) to have read, write or read/write access to your storage.
- Can I grant access to my storage to others outside of UCI?
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You will need to sponsor a UCINetID for your external collaborators. They will then be able to access CRSP using normal mechanisms.
- Can I add several students/postdocs to my Lab drive, how do I do that?
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Please send a request to hpc-support@uci.edu telling us the UCINetIDs and names of the people that you want to add.
- Can departments purchase CRSP space to store business data?
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No. CRSP is designed and funded for research data. Storing non-research data will compromise CRSP status as research equipment (which has significant tax implications).
- Am I charged on how much space I use on some sort of average basis?
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No. This is a capacity recharge similar to purchasing an N Terabyte disk dedicated for your use. If you are utilizing only 1/2 of the space, you are still charged for your purchased capacity.
- What happens if I can’t pay for my space
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You will be required to bring your utilized capacity to be within your baseline allocation. RCIC can work with you to move data off of CRSP in a timely manner. If a researcher is not reducing utilized capacity, access to all data in this space will be frozen (no read or write access). If, after multiple attempts, the owner of the space remains unresponsive, data will be deleted to bring it to baseline allocation.
- Can researchers pool their baseline allocation to make one large space?
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No. In extensive consultation with RCIC Executive committee, we established the people cost of tracking and implementing such combinations outweigh the benefits.
- Are there any network in/out charges (similar to commercial cloud storage)?
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No. CRSP is connected at high-speed to the campus network and leverages this existing resource.
2.4.2. Using
- I can’t access CRSP from home, why?
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All access modes of CRSP require you to be connected the UCI production network. From home, you must use the campus VPN (virtual private network)
- I downloaded Webdrive directly from their website, how do I add the UCI license?
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You cannot. You must use CRSP provided CRSP Desktop which is a specialized version of Webdrive for Windows and Mac that already have the license key embedded.
- I want to publish some of my data on the web, can I do that?
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Not yet. This is more complicated than it might appear. The key questions revolve around data security.
- I have trouble accessing CRSP shares
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Consult our Troubleshooting Guide
2.5. Disk Quotas
2.5.1. $HOME quota
- I cant save any files in my $HOME, i get a file write error
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You exceeded your $HOME disk quota. See how to check and fix your $HOME quota
2.5.2. CRSP quota
- I cant save files in my CRSP area. How do i check my quotas?
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See explanation.
2.5.3. DFS quota
- I am transferring files and am getting the “Disk quota exceeded” error on /dfs5/bio. But my files are small, how can it be?
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You need to (1) check your quota for the specific DFS filesystem and (2) check file and directory permissions. See this guide for instructions on checking quotas and tips on data transfers.
- I am running a Slurm job and am getting the “Disk quota exceeded” error on /dfs2/Xlab
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This is group writable area, all users who write in this area contribute to the quota and the quota is sum total of all written files. Even if your job output smal files , others may have filled it. You need to (1) check your quota for the specific DFS filesystem See this guide for instructions
3. Slurm jobs
3.1. How to run jobs
- Why should I request an interactive shell and how do I do this?
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Users need to use an interactive shell when they plan to run some tasks that take longer than 20 min and are compute intensive (CPU or memory) operations. These includes running applications (including GUI) or data transfers. The interactive shells are simply processes that run on compute nodes of the cluster. See how to request an interactive shell.
- How do I submit a job to the Slurm queue and see its status?
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You can submit a job as an interactive shell using srun command or a batch job using sbatch command and see its status with squeue command. See quick start for examples.
- What are array jobs, how do I submit an array job?
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Array jobs are identical independent jobs that are run using one or more different input parameters. Instead of writing many submit scripts one can use a single script to submit many jobs. See array jobs for details.
- Why am I getting emails about running my application on login node?
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This is explained in simple code of conduct
- How do I charge my jobs to my account or my PI’s account?
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Every user has a default account (UCnetID) and may have a few PI lab accounts. If not specified, a default account is charged (exception is free* queues). To specify a PI’s account one need to use a -A slurm directive either on a command line when asking fort an interactive shell or in a Slurm batch job. See interactive shell and batch examples for details.
- How do I buy more Slurm time?
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A basic allocation is explained in the reference guide. Only PIs can purchase more hours. Please see how to get more time.
- How do I ask for more cores for my job? If I ask for X cores does my job run X times faster?
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You need to specify options --ntasks or --cpus-per-task in your job submission. See Slurm guide for examples. Asking for more cores does not make your program run faster unless your program is capable of using multiple cores. The performance of a given program does not always scale with more CPUs.
- How do I know if I need more cores for my job?
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There are 2 distinct situations:
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You generally need to run a program that is multi-CPU aware. Often such programs have a parameter that specifies the number of CPUs it will use. If the program has no such switch, or you don’t set the switch, your program is likely using 1 CPU (and you will be charged for several if you ask for more).
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Your job failed with OOM error.
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- How do I know if I need more memory for a job?
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Your job failed with OOM error.
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You have a knowledge of how much memory your program is using on an input of a certain size and you increased the input.
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To find out how much memory and CPU your job is using you need to use sacct, seff, and sstat commands. See job monitoring for details.
- How do I profile my job?
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Slurm records statistics for every job, including how much memory and CPU was used, and the usage efficiency. Slurm provides some job monitoring capabilities that can give an idea about consumed memory, CPU and the efficiency. For most jobs they provide sufficient information to understand what resources are needed.
- How do I see how many hours of credit I have used?
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You need to use sbank command.
- How do I see what jobs were run and what charges they incurred over a period of time for a given account ?
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We have a zotledger tool that provides this info.
3.2. Job errors
3.2.1. OOM errors
- My job failed and the output indicates "out of memory error". What should i do?
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Your job was removed by Slurm because it exceeded its memory request. All queues have specific associated memory. You need to increase the memory requirements for your job. See examples in this guide. For the jobs that require more memory than the standard/free queues can provide or for the jobs that require A LOT of memory and not many CPUs, there is a limited number of higher memory nodes that are accessible via higher memory queues. You will have to request access to these higher memory queues via sending email to hpc-support@uci.edu and provide a proof that your application needs a higher memory access.
3.2.2. Job pending
- My job is in the queue with reason shown as (AssocGrpCPUMinutesLimit), what is wrong?
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You don’t have enough hours in your account balance to run the job. See how to find an explanation
3.2.3. Job killed
- My job is killed after runnng for 48 hours, why?
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You run your job with a default runtime, and Slurm killed the job once the run time limit was reached. All queues have specific default and max runtime limits. The default run time protects users from unintentionally using more CPU hours than intended. When your job needs longer run time than a default, you need to specify it with -t (or --time) directive. See time limit.
4. Software
- How do I install new software?
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Please see the user installed software
- How do I request software installation?
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We have a guide that explains how to request new softare
5. Quick Links
Please see guides below that provide more information and explain how to get help and how to use HPC3:
