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Alex Pedcenko (aa3025) edited this page Sep 20, 2022 · 21 revisions

What is SULIS?

Coventry University entered into an equipment bid with the Midlands+ group of Universities for a Tier 2 HPC cluster. This bid was successful, and the new cluster, called SULIS, is due to go into production. As one of the consortium in the bid, we have an allocation of core hours and GPU hours on the cluster. The cluster consists of 25,216 AMD EPYC compute cores configured as 167 dual processor CPU compute nodes plus 30 nodes equipped with three Nvidia A100 40GB GPUs. The cluster has a proportion of time reserved for the EPSRC to allocate outside the consortium, but consortium members are also allowed to bid for the EPSRC allocated time.

SULIS will be going live on Monday 1st November and we are now inviting expressions of interest. Please find a link to a form, in order to indicate your interest in using the cluster, the time required on the cluster and proposed usage here - https://forms.office.com/r/WKpfznnJte

If you have any queries please email HPC.MPCS@coventry.ac.uk

How to get access to SULIS

All Sulis users must register with SAFE, an account management and administration portal for HPC services run by the Edinburgh Parallel Computer Centre (EPCC). The procedure is as follows: I) Create your SAFE account II) Associate your SAFE account with CU “project code” on SAFE (su003) III) Create login to Sulis HPC, upload public SSH key.

Once that done, the logins for the Sulis HPC will require using your SSH public key and 2-factor authentication (MS Authenticator or Google Authenticator or similar)

What you need to do (details are at https://sulis-hpc.github.io/gettingstarted/getaccount.html ) :

  1. Create yourself an individual account on SAFE SAFE website https://safe.epcc.ed.ac.uk/ -> “Create an account” (https://safe.epcc.ed.ac.uk/signup.jsp) Please use your CU login name and e-mail for registering there. Do not try "Login with institutional credentials", it will not work. Press "Create account": https://safe.epcc.ed.ac.uk/signup.jsp

At this step (optional, but will be required eventually in step 4) you can supply the public part of your personal SSH key. The connections to Sulis will need to be originating from CU network, hence you need to be aware which SSH key you are adding. It is possible later to add more than one SSH key to be able to login from different devices. If you have EEC HPC account, you can use your ssh key from there (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) and then connect to SULIS form our HPC.

SULIS permits ssh logins only from CU IP institutional addresses, so the direct connection won't work (even via CU VPN). Your ssh-connection must come from CU network, e.g. from one of our HPCs (or your own machine in CU subnet). It is also possible to use our HPCs as a ssh ProxyJump host. See https://github.coventry.ac.uk/aa3025/sulis-help/wiki/05-Accessing-SULIS-from-outside-CU-campus for more details.

  1. Once you receive confirmation from SAFE that your account is created, you will need to login to SAFE with newly created account and add your SAFE account to our project “su003”: on SAFE website -> Projects (top menu) -> Request Access -> su003

  2. I will receive your request and approve it.

  3. Now you will be able to create your username for Sulis. Please use the same username as you have at CU. Here you will also need to upload your public SSH key if you didn’t do it in step 1.

Once that’s done you will be able to do first-time login to Sulis “login.sulis.ac.uk” via SSH with that SSH-key you specified.

IMPORTANT

on 1st login to login.sulis.ac.uk, you will be presented in the console with a QR code for 2-factor-authenticator app and immediately logged out. Take a photo of that code with all the secondary codes for safe storage. Use this QR code with (2FA) Microsoft or Google authenticator app e.g. on your phone to add it to resp. authenticator app. Next time you will try to login to login.sulis.ac.uk it will ask for the code from the authenticator.

If possible do not use PuTTY as your terminal for this step, as PuTTY is known to close the terminal window once connection is closed and you will not have a chance to capture the QR code**. Use Windows terminal app or Linux/MacOS terminal. You can also initiate connection from a terminal of our HPCs if you have an account on them.

  1. Next I will need to add CPU & GPU budgets to your accounts, so there may be some short delay before you can actually submit jobs on sulis, but that should be quite swift I hope. The jobs are submitted similarly to Zeus/Epyc/etc HPCs via slurm scheduler.

More detailed guides are here: Home - Sulis HPC on github.io (http://sulis-hpc.github.io)

OUR Local (CU) guides are here: Home · aa3025/sulis-help Wiki (https://github.coventry.ac.uk/aa3025/sulis-help/wiki)

For Issues/questions please use this e-mail group Sulis HPC_O365 SulisHPC_o365@live.coventry.ac.uk or via raise the issue via enterprise guthub repo here: Issues · aa3025/sulis-help (https://github.coventry.ac.uk/aa3025/sulis-help/issues)

Your 1st level support for Sulis is myself, I can then escalate issues further to Sulis team if necessary.

Best Regards Alex

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