Andromeda 2 Specifics

Once on Andromeda 2 you’ll find a mostly similar setup to Andromeda 1, with a few key differences:

  • Storage quotas
    • Your home directory (/home/<login>) has a 50G initial quota
      • Intended for storing personal data only
      • Thirty days of nightly snapshots
    • The project directory (/projects/<project_name>) has a 5TB initial quota
      • Intended for storing research related data that is shared with the group
      • 30 days of nightly snapshots
    • The scratch directory (/scratch/<login>) has a 5TB initial quota
      • Intended for storing ephemeral data that can be easily replaced and does not need to be shared, or is only needed for a short time (e.g. While a job is running.)
  • Open OnDemand (ood.bc.edu)
    • Replaces NoMachine on top of providing a significant amount of addition functionality
    • OOD Remote Desktop Sessions have a maximum time limit of 12 hours
      • The session itself is run inside a Slurm job on one of the compute nodes
      • Session are only allocated 2 cores and 4G of RAM
      • If additional resources are needed a batch job can be submitted or the salloc command can be used to work interactively
  • Login node (a002.bc.edu) resources
    • 8 cores and 96G of RAM
    • Intended for file transfers, SSH access and job submissions
    • Access to module packages is very limited, compared to the compute nodes
    • Will soon be monitored by Arbiter to ensure login node resources are not used improperly
  • Compute nodes
    • Currently there are 19 CPU nodes available
    • CPU core reservations per node
      • Ensures jobs cannot starve the OS, Slurm or the Weka storage agent
      • 2 cores for the OS and Slurm
      • 2 cores for Weka
    • RAM reservations per node
      • Ensures jobs cannot starve the OS, Slurm or Weka
      • 5G per compute node
    • Minimal OS
      • As few packages have been installed to the local disk as possible
      • vm.swappiness set to 1
        • Avoids, as much as possible, the use of 400G swap area when physical RAM is available
  • Slurm Partitions
    • All compute nodes are currently available to the primary partitions
      • As more compute nodes are added each partition will have a subset of compute nodes dedicated to them, based on usage
      • “Interactive” partition only has one node, which is reserved for OOD Desktop sessions, for now
    • Primary Partitions
      • short – 12 hour time limit (highest partition priority)
      • medium – 48 hour time limit (moderate partition priority
      • long – 120 hour time limit (lowest partition priority)
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