MiCE 5035 Getting Started Guide

To connect to an MSI supercomputer, please follow these steps:

Connect to MSI login node using "OnDemand":

• Control-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac) here to open the MSI OnDemand dashboard in a new tab: https://ood.msi.umn.edu
• Click Clusters > Agate Shell Access to open a terminal with command-line access to a login node.
• Click Files > Home Directory to view your files
• Note: you can also SSH in to MSI from a terminal with ssh username@login.msi.umn.edu

Switch to the MICE 5035 "group" if you also have another group

If you are in a lab group or another class group, you can run this to switch to our class group account:

newgrp mice5035

You can check if you're in other groups with this:

groups

Launch and connect to an interactive computing node

• When you first log in to MSI, you will be on a "login" node. You are not allowed to run computations on this node. Instead, you can launch an interactive node for running computations with this command:

# Note: --ntasks-per-node is the number of cores you want
# and --mem-per-cpu is the RAM _per_ core
# and -t is the time you want allowed
srun -N 1 --ntasks-per-node=4 --mem-per-cpu=4gb -t 02:00:00 -p agsmall --pty bash

This may take a while to finish running. It will log you directly in to the interactive node. Often you can see that this has happened because the start of the line in the terminal will say something like "yourusername@cn0077" or "yourusename@acn001" and it will be different from what it was on the previous line. If in doubt, you can run hostname to print out the name of the node. Login nodes usually start with ahl or login or ln.

Note: if this fails to connect, please try logging back in and running this instead (requesting the interactive partition instead of the agsmall partition):

srun -N 1 --ntasks-per-node=4 --mem-per-cpu=4gb -t 02:00:00 -p interactive --pty bash

One-time setup

If this is the FIRST TIME you have connected to MSI in this class, follow the one-time setup instructions.

Log out

When you are done using MSI, log out with exit, or you can type control-D. You may have to enter this several times if you are logged in to a special node or cluster.

Troubleshooting

• If you have trouble connecting, try filling out the MSI user agreement here: https://www.msi.umn.edu/user-agreement.
• Make sure you are on campus, connected to the the UofM network or eduroam network. Otherwise, MSI will block your computer from connecting. To get around this, you can also use a University of Minnesota VPN.