Documentation and guidelines for the Alan GPU cluster at the University of Liège.
The documentation assumes you have access to the private network of the university.
Table of contents:
If you do not have an account, then first request an account to the GPU cluster.
Once you have been provided with your account details by e-mail, you can connect to Alan through SSH:
you@local:~ $ ssh [email protected]After logging in with the password provided by the account confirmation e-mail, you will be forced to change the password.
The e-mail will additionally contain a private authentication key which can be used to connect to the GPU cluster. The key can be used by manually executing:
you@local:~ $ ssh -i path/to/privatekey [email protected]The authentication procedure can be automated by moving the private key
you@local:~ $ cp path/to/privatekey ~/.ssh/id_alan
you@local:~ $ chmod 400 ~/.ssh/id_alanand adding
Host alan
HostName master.alan.priv
User you
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_alan
to ~/.ssh/config.
On your initial login, we will guide you to automatically install a conda environment. Carefully read the instructions. If you cancelled the installation procedure, you can still setup conda by executing:
you@master:~ $ wget https://repo.anaconda.com/archive/Anaconda3-2023.07-1-Linux-x86_64.sh
you@master:~ $ sh Anaconda3-2023.07-1-Linux-x86_64.shAlternatively, for a lightweight drop-in replacement of conda, you can install micromamba by executing
you@master:~ $ bash <(curl -L micro.mamba.pm/install.sh)The installation of your Deep Learning environment is quite straightforward after conda has been configured. In general we recommend to work with environments on a per-project basis as it allows for better encapsulation and reproducibility of your experiments.
you@master:~ $ conda create -n myenv python=3.9 -c conda-forge
you@master:~ $ conda activate myenv
(myenv) you@master:~ $ python --version
Python 3.9.13(myenv) you@master:~ $ conda install pytorch torchvision -c pytorch -c nvidia(myenv) you@master:~ $ pip install --upgrade "jax[cuda11_pip]" -f https://storage.googleapis.com/jax-releases/jax_cuda_releases.html(myenv) you@master:~ $ conda install tensorflow-gpu -c conda-forgeThis section shows you how to transfer your datasets to the GPU cluster. It is a good practice to centralize your datasets in a common folder:
you@master:~ $ mkdir -p path/to/datasets
you@master:~ $ cd path/to/datasetsThe transfer is initiated using scp from the machine storing the data (e.g. your desktop computer) to the cluster:
you@local:~ $ scp -r my_dataset alan:path/to/datasetsAlternatively, one can rely on rsync:
you@local:~ $ rsync -r -v --progress my_dataset -e ssh alan:path/to/datasetsThe CECI cluster documentation features a thorough Slurm guide. Read it carefully before using Alan.
Elementary tutorials can also be found in /tutorials. Read them to get started quickly.
sbatch: submit a job to the cluster.- To reserve
NGPU(s) add--gres=gpu:Ntosbatch.
- To reserve
scancel: cancel queued or running jobs.srun: launch a job step.squeue: display jobs currently in the queue and their associated metadata.sacct: display accounting data for jobs (including finished/cancelled jobs).sinfo: get information about the cluster and its nodes.seff: resource utilization efficiency of the specified job.
The cluster provides several queues or job partitions. We made the design decision to partition the job queues based on the GPU type: 1080ti (GTX 1080 Ti), 2080ti (RTX 2080 Ti), quadro (Quadro RTX 6000) and tesla (Tesla V100). This enables the user to specifically request specific GPUs depending on her needs. A specific job partition can be requested by specifying --partition=<partition> to the sbatch command or in your submission script. If no partition is specified, then a job will be scheduled where resources are available.
For debugging purposes, e.g. if you would like to quickly test your script, you can also make use of the debug partition by specifying --partition=debug. This partition has a maximum execution time of 15 minutes.
A full overview of the available partitions is shown below.
you@master:~ $ sinfo -s
PARTITION AVAIL TIMELIMIT NODELIST
all* up 14-00:00:0 compute-[01-04,06-13]
debug up 15:00 compute-05
1080ti up 14-00:00:0 compute-[01-04]
2080ti up 14-00:00:0 compute-[06-10]
quadro up 14-00:00:0 compute-[11-12]
tesla up 14-00:00:0 compute-13
priority-quadro up 14-00:00:0 compute-[11-12]
priority-tesla up 14-00:00:0 compute-13
priority up 14-00:00:0 compute-[01-04,06-13]The high-priority partitions priority-quadro and priority-tesla can be used to request either Quadro RTX 6000 or Tesla V100 GPUs while flagging your job as high priority in the job queue. This privilege is only available to some users. The quadro and tesla partitions can be requested by all users, but the priority of the corresponding jobs will be kept as normal.
Your priority status can be obtained by executing:
you@master:~ $ sacctmgr show assoc | grep $USER | grep priority > /dev/null && echo "allowed" || echo "not allowed"We provide the following filesystems to the user.
| Mountpoint | Name | Capacity | Purpose | Load data to GPU from filesystem? | Data persistance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
/home/$USER |
Home directory | 11TB | Hosts your main files and binaries. | Only if the dataset fits in memory. Do not use this endpoint if your jobs perform a lot of random I/O. | ✔️ |
/scratch/users/$USER |
Global scratch directory | 65TB | Global decentralized filesystem. Store your datasets here if they do not fit in memory, or if it consists of a lot of small files. | Yes | ❌ |
Data persistance is only guaranteed on /home/$USER. Backing-up data hosted on /scratch is your responsibility. The results of a computation should preferably stored in /home/$USER.
It is generally not recommended to load small batches from the main storage disk. This translates into a lot of random IO operations on the main storage hard disks of the cluster, which in turn degrades the performance of all jobs. We recommend the following ways to load data into the GPU:
Use the global /scratch filesystem.
In this case, we recommend to simply read the dataset into memory and load your batches directly from RAM. This will not cause any issues as the data is sequentially read from the main RAID array on the master. This has the desirable effect that the heads of the hard disks do not have to move around constantly for every (random) small batch your are trying to load, thereby not degrading the performance of the main cluster storage.
At the moment we provide the following cluster-wide, read-only datasets which are accessible at /scratch/datasets:
you@master:~ $ ls -l /scratch/datasetsIf you would like to propose a new cluster-wide dataset, feel free to submit a proposal.
We provide a centralised Jupyter instance which can be accessed using your Alan account at https://alan.montefiore.uliege.be/jupyter. Launching kernels within existing environments is possible. No additional configuration is required.
Please note that, in order to use existing environments, Anaconda should be installed (compact installations such as miniconda will not work).
Important: Make sure
nb_conda_kernelsinstalled in yourbaseenvironment if you want your Anaconda environments to show up in JupyterHub. In addition, ensureipykernelis installed in your environments of interest.
Yes, simply change the tree keyword in the URL to lab. For instance
https://alan.montefiore.uliege.be/jupyter/user/you/tree
becomes
https://alan.montefiore.uliege.be/jupyter/user/you/lab
We allow you to have more than one running server at the same time. To add a new server, navigate to the control panel.
In the top left corner: File -> Hub Control Panel
In the top right corner: Control Panel
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