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Getting Started

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Getting an account

MCSR provides free access to supercomputers for all students, faculty, and staff at public institutions of higher learning in the state of Mississippi. To request your free accounts, please fill out this form. Please use your official University email address so we can verify your student/faculty/staff status.

We will get your accounts created within one business day. You will receive an email with more information.

New Users

Welcome to MCSR! We understand that using supercomputers in a UNIX environment for the first time can be a little intimidating. Hopefully the links below will give you all the information you need to get started.

  1. We have a fairly strict password policy. Getting familiar with it will cause you less frustration in the future.
  2. Take a quick look at our very short list of rules.
  3. Now you’re ready to download an SSH client and get connected to the supercomputers.
  4. Look at a brief description of our supercomputers and decide which one is best suited to your job. Maple is best for most purposes.
  5. Now, login to your chosen supercomputer and run an example job. This will introduce you to some basic UNIX and PBS mechanics. PBS is the system we use to allocate and share resources on the supercomputers.
  6. Before you start running jobs of your own it’s a good idea to get familiar with basic UNIX commands.
  7. Have a look at how our software is organized. Then check our Documentation page and see if the software you want to use is listed. If you find that we do not have your software installed, you can install it yourself in your home directory, or contact us to have it installed.
  8. We have example jobs for most of our installed software. Find the example job for the software you want to use, copy to your home directory, modify it to fit your purposes, and run it. Look back at the Running an example job page if you need a refresher on how to do that.
  9. PBS has a lot of helpful options. Take a moment to look at our Running jobs page for more information on PBS.

If you still have questions, please feel free to contact the MCSR staff for assistance.

Passwords

All MCSR systems have separate passwords. To change a password, login to that system and run the passwd command. It will ask for your current password, then your new password, twice. When typing your passwords, nothing will show up on the screen. This is standard UNIX behavior.

Passwords must have a minimum of eight characters and have at least one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter, one number, and one special character. Dictionary words and consecutive letters from the keyboard are not allowed. Previous passwords are not allowed. This is a University of Mississippi policy which MCSR must follow.

Passwords can only be changed once every seven days. Passwords will expire every 90 days.

NOTE: The SSH Secure Shell software password does not handle resetting expired (or initial) passwords correctly. We recommend using PuTTY to connect to MCSR systems, especially when needing to reset a password. More information on the Getting Connected page.

For assistance with passwords, please contact the MCSR staff by email or phone.

 

Rules

MCSR takes a very hands-off approach to supercomputing, but we do have a few rules that should be followed:

  1. All jobs should be run via PBS, whether via a script or an interaction session. No running jobs on the head node or hpcwoods.
  2. Users should ensure their jobs don’t use more resources than they have reserved via PBS. Usually this is enforced by PBS, but users are responsible for keeping an eye on their jobs.
  3. Jobs should efficiently use resources. Use what you request.
  4. Users queuing multiple jobs at once should take care that their scripts are doing what they expect them to do.
    1. Jobs requiring less than 5 minutes should be combined with other, similar jobs. This can be done via a simple for loop or with a program like GNU Parallel.
    2. Users queuing more than 1,000 jobs should clear it with MCSR staff in advance.
  5. Some resources are reserved for certain types of jobs:
    1. The biggpu queue on Maple should only be used by jobs using the GPUs on those nodes.
    2. Catalpa should only be used by jobs needing more than 32GB of memory.
  6. Do not upload any data that contains protected health information (PHI).

Users found to be ignoring these rules are subject to discipline, up to and including loss of all MCSR privileges.

If you have any questions about what is allowed on MCSR systems, please contact the staff.