VHPC QuickStart Guides

The new HPC (vhpc) is a Research Computing Core Facility.  These core services have charges and requests for them need to be associated with a billable account.

To get stated with a service, follow these steps.

1. Set up a billable account (from your Award or KSU SpeedChart #), use the Research Core Billable Account FormNote: this form can also be used to request a voucher for free credits.

2. Once you have a billable account,  use the Research Core Service Request Form to add services to your account.

3. Once your account is tied to the sercvice, use Research Core Service Management Form to add users who can can charge to your account. 

Slurm is an open-source job scheduler designed for Linux and Unix-like systems, primarily used in high-performance computing environments. It manages resource allocation, job execution, and monitoring for computing clusters, making it a key tool for running parallel jobs efficiently.

QuickStart User Guide
https://slurm.schedmd.com/quickstart.html

A Node is a computer in the cluster meant for processing jobs.

A CPU is the part to the computer that performs computation.

A core is part of a CPU that executes an instruction

A task is commonly used in Slurm and is tied to cores and threads.

A GPU is an accessory of the computer that has its own chips and memory that allows it to specialize in linear algebra operations.

A job is a user's task(s) that requests and utilizes an allocation of resources to complete.

Walltime is part of the allocation request by a user for their job's duration.

While slurm system is composed of many components, the following commands are how most users will interact with the system:

sacct - report on accounting information for active or completed jobs

salloc - a real time request for resources that spawns a shell

sbatch - to submit job script for later execution

scancel - to cancel a pending or running job

squeue - report on the state of jobs

srun - used to submit a job for execution

sstat - report on resources utilized by a running job

1. Download Global Protect form vpn.kennesaw.edu and use it to connect to vpn-groups portal.
2. Use your terminal app to start an ssh session.  # ssh NetID@vhpc
3. Choose your DUO preference and complete the 2-factor authentication 

This section is not an exact science but these translations might help you early on. 

Equating PBS & Slurm

• qsub & sbatch
• showq & squeue
• qstat & sstat
• interact is still interact
• See slurm's own rosetta stone

Old HPC & vhpc

• (batch, gpuq, himem) & defq
• scratch & work
• interact didn't change
• ksu-jupyter-notebook didn't change

#!/bin/bash

#SBATCH --job-name=your_job_name

#SBATCH --output=%j.out   # name the output with jobid.out

#SBATCH --nodes=1   # nodes requested

#SBATCH --ntasks=48   # number of tasks/cores

#SBATCH --partition="defq"  # default queue

#SBATCH --time=0-01:00:00  # wall time requested days-hh:mm:ss

#SBATCH --mail-type="BEGIN,END,FAIL,TIME_LIMIT_90"

#SBATCH --mail-user="NetID@kennesaw.edu" 

#SBATCH --account="your_account" 

#SBATCH --gres=gpu:4   # requested no. of gpus

#SBATCH --mem=480G   # requested memory

module load whateveryouneed

your_app your_data

exit 0

• walltime: 720 hours
• memory: 503 GB
• cpu: 144 cores

• vhpc CPU: $0.03 per core hour
• vhpc GPU: $0.12 per GPU hour
• vhpc RAM: $0.004 per GB per hour
• NOTE: In determining cost, memory use is not added to the core usage, but rather them maximum is determined between them and is used.

Examples:

• 1 hour job (2 cores, 1 GPU, 24 GB RAM) = $0.24 due to CPU/GPU
• 1 hour job (24 cores, 0 GPU, 240 GB RAM) = $ 0.96 due to memory utilization
• 1 hour job (48 cores, 4 GPU, 503 GB ) = $2.01 due to memory greater than cpu/gpu is $1.92