Getting started with RAAD2

Introduction

The new cluster, named "raad2", is a Linux based system from the vendor Cray and has a total of 4,128 traditional CPU cores of the Intel Haswell architecture. Each of its 172 compute nodes contains 24 physical CPU cores -- 2 processor sockets with 12 cores per socket -- and 128GB of RAM. The interconnect is comprised of the Cray Aries network, which is employed both for MPI as well as storage traffic. Raad2 runs SLURM as its workload manager, and​ is paired with a storage system from the vendor DDN that uses the parallel filesystem Lustre, providing 800TB of usable disk capacity accessible from all nodes.

Accessing Raad2

Once your account is approved, you will receive an email notification containing temporary login credentials and some basic guidance on how to access the system.

Login to machine

You may login to the system using any SSH client, but make sure to VPN into the TAMUQ network if you are accessing the machine from outside the TAMUQ building.

[mustarif63@raad2b]% ssh <user_name>@raad2.qatar.tamu.edu

Note that the system login nodes are actually named "raad2a" and "raad2b" and you will automatically be directed to one or the other of these; it does not matter which login node you land on, or if you land on different ones in different login sessions -- both are configured identically and you may treat them as one and the same, even though they are two distinct physical servers.

Change password

You will be prompted to change your initial password on your first login to raad2. Note that unlike with raad, your raad2 account password is NOT linked to your TAMUQ domain account, although you may choose to set your password string to be identical to that other password. In order to change your initial password, as you type your current password and new password, you will notice the cursor doesn't move; this is normal and you may continue to enter your password string and proceed to hit enter thereafter.

Locate home directory

Your home directory location is /ddn/home/<user_name> and it resides on the shared storage system. When you login to the machine, by default you land in this location.

mustarif63@raad2b:~> pwd
/ddn/home/mustarif63
mustarif63@raad2b:~>

Applications available on the system

There are multiple software packages (applications, compilers & development tools, libraries, etc) which came bundled with the base software stack on the system. There are also others we installed on the system upon user request. All these can be listed for perusal using the command below:

mustarif63@raad2b:~> module avail

To setup the environment to access any specific software from your shell, you can issue...

mustarif63@raad2b:~> module load <module_name>