bigelowlab / charlie

Bigelow HPCC

Charlie Overview

charlie: Bigelow's high performance computing cluster (HPCC), consisting of multiple nodes
sfe: Secure front end - for remote login without VPN
cfe: Charlie front end - where jobs are submitted
c1: UV2000 - 160 cores (Intel Xeon E7-4640, 2.1GHz (2.60GHz turbo), 40MB cache, 12 cores, 24 threads), 1.25TB memory
c2: UV300 - 128 cores (Intel Xeon E7-4850, 2.1GHz (2.80GHz turbo), 30MB cache, 16 cores, 32 threads), 2TB memory (* limited to SCGC/Stepanauskas group)
c3: Dell R610 stack (15 nodes, each with 12 cores [2 Intel Xeon X5650, 2.67GHz, 6 cores, 12 threads], 62GB memory)
cdata: SGI NetApp storage cluster on c2

Requesting an account

To request an account on Charlie, please download and complete the Account Request Form in Storage > Resources > IT > Forms. If you do not have access to storage, please email [email protected] to request a form. Once your request has been approved and the account created, you will receive an email with your username and a temporary password. You will be prompted to change this password the first time that you log in.

Using Charlie

Code is not run directly on cfe, which has very limited resources. Rather jobs are submitted to Charlie's nodes (e.g. c1, c2, and c3) using the PBS Pro job scheduler. Only basic programs and utilities are installed on the nodes themselves. To use software packages that are not installed locally (or a different version than what is installed locally) you will use environment modules.

Troubleshooting

There is an active community of Charlie users on the Bigelow Slack workspace. Channels include: #comp-charlie and #comp-code. Please post questions there before emailing [email protected].