Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is an Oxford-wide HPC facility.
It is divided into ARCUS-B
, ARCUS-C
and ARCUS-HTC
clusters. All systems run Linux.
All researchers of Oxford University have access to the hardware listed here, via a credit system.
Members of Simon Benjamin's QTechTheory can make use of privileged access (credit-free) of the following hardware:
- [info] CPU nodes on
ARCUS-B
- [info] CPU and GPU nodes on
ARCUS-C
- [info] "Big Chungus" - a 6TB CPU node on
ARCUS-HTC
.
All clusters are accessed with the same ARC credentials, the username for which will match your Oxford Single Sign-On (e.g. corp1234
). Your ARC password can be managed on the myaccount
arc server:
ssh [NAME]@myaccount.arc.ox.ac.uk
and running passwd
.
We recommend setting up passphrase-free access for these clusters, as detailed here.
All clusters conveniently share a network file system directly accessible by both submit nodes (from which you submit jobs) and compute nodes (which ultimately run your jobs). A user [NAME]
has private directories:
-
15GB of storage at:
/home/[NAME]/
Though this is the default directory (where you'll SSH to), we recommend not using it, since jobs will unexpectedly fail if writing to this directory near the storage limit.
-
2TB of storage at:
/data/oums-quantopo/[NAME]/
where
oums-quantopo
is the reservation managed by Simon. We recommend SSH'ing directly into this directory, as detailed here.
To copy files back and forth between your machine and ARC, we recommend setting up a virtual mount as detailed here
Jobs on all clusters are submitted and scheduled using SLURM, which we include an introductory and advanced guide for here.
Environments and utilites, like compilers, can be loaded with the module
system.