Close menu Resources for... William & Mary
W&M menu close William & Mary

Astral

The Astral subcluster of SciClone contains one front-end (astral/as00) with 32 CPU cores and one node (as01) with 64 Platinum Intel cores and 8x Nvidia A30 GPUs with 24 GB of GPU memory.  This cluster should be used for mainly small (1-16) cpu jobs and/or GPU jobs.

Hardware

Front-end

astral/as00

GPU node

as01

Model Dell PowerEdge R750 Lenovo ThinkSystem SR670 V2
Processor(s)

2×24 core

Intel Xeon Gold 6336Y

2x32 core

Intel Xeon Platinum 8362

Clock speed

2.4 GHz

2.80 GHz

GPU

--

8x Nvidia A30 (24GB)
Memory 256 GB 512 GB

Network

interfaces

Application

HDR IB (as00-ib)

HDR IB (as01-ib)

System

10 GbE 

OS Rocky Linux 9.2
Slurm

The SLURM batch system is used on astral/as01 to run jobs.  The maximum walltime for all jobs on this cluster is 72hrs.  The front-end, astral, has 32 CPU cores available which will be the default node if you require only CPUs.   The GPU node, as01, may be specidied via your command-line options:

To run an interactive job on CPUs only:

salloc -n 4 -t 1:00:00     # will get you 4 CPU cores

To request one or more GPUs:

salloc -n 4 -t 1:00:00 --gpus=2     # will get you 4 CPU cores and 2 GPUs

The --gpus=N  can be added to your srun command (to run a job directly from the command line) or in your batch script, i.e.:

#SBATCH --gpus=2

Currently, there are no reserved slots for debugging.  Please send email to [hpc-help] if you need help obtaining resources on this subcluster. 


User Environment

To login, use SSH from any host on the William & Mary or VIMS networks and connect to astral.sciclone.wm.edu with your HPC username (usually the same as your WMuserid) and W&M password.

Your home directory on Astral is the same as everywhere else on SciClone, and all of the usual filesystems (/sciclone/homeXX, /sciclone/dataXX, /sciclone/scrXX, /local/scr, etc.) are available.

SciClone uses Environment Modules (a.k.a Modules) to automatically configure the user's shell environment across multiple computing platforms, as well as to organize the dozens of different software packages which are available on the system. We support tcsh as the primary shell environment for user accounts and applications.  

The file which controls startup modules for astral is .cshrc.kuro. A copy of this file can be found in /usr/local/etc/templates on kuro.sciclone.wm.edu.  

 

Preferred filesystems

The astral front-end server has a small 63 GB /local/scr partition which can be used for small files.  The as01 GPU node has a 14TB NVME local scratch disk which should be utilized for local file i/o if possible.

The preferred global file system for all work on astral is /sciclone/scr10/$USER is a good alternative (NFS, but connected to the same InfiniBand switch).


Compiler flags

All W&M HPC clusters have Intel and GNU compilers available.   There are somewhat frequent updates so please check the modules that are available on each cluster.  Here are suggested flags for Ice-Lake cpus: 

Intel C icc -O3 -xHost -fma -align -finline-functions
C++ icpc -std=c11 -O3 -xHost -fma -align -finline-functions
Fortran ifort -O3 -xHost -fma -align array64byte -finline-functions
GNU C gcc -march=native -O3 -mfma -malign-data=cacheline -finline-functions
C++ g++ -std=c11 -march=native -O3 -mfma -malign-data=cacheline -finline-functions
Fortran gfortran -march=native -O3 -mfma -malign-data=cacheline -finline-functions

MPI
All W&M HPC clusters have both Intel MPI and OpenMPI installed.  Some older clusters also have Mvapich2.  All parallel jobs (shared memory, MPI or hybrid) need to be run through the batch system.  The standard way to do this is to use the batch script

#!/bin/tcsh
#SBATCH --job-name=test
#SBATCH --nodes=1 --ntasks-per-node=8
#SBATCH -t 30:00
#SBATCH --gpus=1

srun ./a.out >& LOG

Please see our Slurm page for more help.