Switching to the new PBS and OS Debian12

Operational news of the MetaCentrum & CERIT-SC infrastructures

We would like to inform users about several new features in the MetaCentrum & CERIT-SC infrastructures:

1) Browser access to GUI applications

It is possible for users to access GUI applications simply through a web browser. For deatiled information see https://wiki.metacentrum.cz/wiki/Remote_desktop#Quick_start_I_-_Run_GUI_desktop_in_a_web_browser.

The access through VNC client (an older and more complicated way to get GUI) remains unchanged - see https://wiki.metacentrum.cz/wiki/Remote_desktop#Quick_start_II_-_Run_GUI_desktop_in_a_VNC_session and following tutorials.

 

2) History of finished jobs

As a new feature users can now fetch data from finished jobs, including those that finished more than 24 hours ago. For this, use command

pbs-get-job-history <job_id>

If the job is found in the archive, the command will create in current dir a new subdirectory called job_ID (e.g. 11808203.meta-pbs.metacentrum.cz) with several files. Namely, there will be


job_ID.SC - a copy of batch script as passed to qsub
job_ID.ER - standard output (STDOUT) of a job
job_ID.OU - standard error output (STDERR) of a job

For detailed information see https://wiki.metacentrum.cz/wiki/PBS_get_job_history  


3) Setting up minimal required memory on GPU card

As a new feature users can now specify a minimum amount of memory the GPU card needs to have. For this there is a new PBS parameter gpu_mem. For example, the command  

qsub -q gpu -l select=1:ncpus=2:ngpus=1:mem=10gb:scratch_local=10gb:gpu_mem=10gb -l walltime=24:0:0

makes sure that the GPU card on computational node will have at least 10 GB of memory.

For more information see https://wiki.metacentrum.cz/wiki/GPU_clusters.

We would also like to note that it is better to select GPU machine by specifying the gpu_mem and cuda_cap parameters than by specifying a particular cluster. The former way includes wider set of machines and therefore the shortens the queuing time of jobs.


Ivana Křenková, Thu Aug 11 15:35:00 CEST 2022