The CHTC high-performance computing (HPC) cluster provides dedicated support for large,
singular computations that use specialized software (i.e. MPI) to achieve internal
parallelization of work across multiple servers of dozens to hundreds of cores.
Is high-performance computing right for me? Only computational work that
fits that above description is appropriate for the HPC Cluster. Computational
work that can complete on a single node in less than a few days will be
best supported by our larger high-throughput computing (HTC) system (which also
includes specialized hardware for extreme memory, GPUs, and other cases). For more
information, please see Our Approach.
To get access to the HPC Cluster, please complete our
New User Consultation Form. After your request is received,
a Research Computing Facilitator will follow up to discuss the computational needs
of your research and connect you with computing
resources (including non-CHTC services) that best fit your needs.
HPC Cluster User Policies
Below is a list of policies that apply to all HPC users.
1. Minimize Work on the Login Nodes
The HPC Cluster login nodes have
limited computing resources that are occupied with running Slurm and managing job submission,
and are not suitable for testing your research software.
Users may run basic data management commands (like tar, cp, mkdir) on the login nodes. The
execution of scripts, including cron, software, and software compilation on the login nodes
is prohibited (and could VERY likely crash the head node). However, users may run small scripts
and commands (to compress data, create directories, etc.) that run within a few minutes, minimizing
their use as much as possible. If you are unsure if your scripts are suitable
for running on the login nodes, consider using an interactive job or contact us at chtc@cs.wisc.edu.
CHTC staff reserve the right to kill any long-running or problematic processes on the
head nodes and/or disable user accounts that violate this policy
2. The HPC Cluster is Reserved for MPI-enabled, Multi-node Jobs
HPC users should not run single-core or single-node jobs to the HPC Cluster, given its
optimization for multi-node/MPI-based work. Users will
be asked to transition work appropriately to our high-throughput computing system.
3. Maintain Copies of Essential Data in non-CHTC Locations
The HPC Cluster filesystem should be treated as temporary/scratch space, and only files necessary for
actively-running jobs should be kept on the filesystem. Once your jobs complete,
your files should be removed from the cluster filesystem. Campus researchers have several options
for persistent data storage solutions, including ResearchDrive
which provides up to 5TB of storage for free per research PI. Our guide
Transferring Files Between CHTC and ResearchDrive provides
step-by-step instructions for transferring your data between HPC Cluster and ResearchDrive.
CHTC Staff reserve the right to remove any significant amounts of data on the HPC Cluster
in our efforts to maintain filesystem performance for all users, though we will always
first ask users to remove excess data and minimize file counts before taking additional action.
4. Fair-share Policies
To promote fair access to HPC computing resources, all users are limited to 10 concurrently
running jobs (if you need to queue more, please get in touch). Additionally, users are restricted to a total of 600 cores
across all running jobs (core limits do not apply on research group partitions of
more than 600 cores).
When determining which order to run jobs, the following policies are applies, in order or significance
to job priority determinations:
A. User priority decreases as the user accumulates hours of CPU time over the last 21 days, across
all queues. This “fair-share” policy means that users who have run many/larger jobs in the near-past
will have a lower priority, and users with little recent activity will see their waiting jobs start sooner.
(The cluster does not have a strict “first-in-first-out” queue policy.)
B. Job priority increases with job wait time. After the history-based user priority calculation in (A),
the next most important factor for each job’s priority is the amount of time that each job has already
waited in the queue. For all the jobs of a single user, these jobs will most closely follow a “first-in-first-out” policy.
C. Job priority increases with job size, in cores. This least important factor slightly favors larger jobs, so that
the scheduler can take advantage when large numbers of newly-available nodes happen to become available (requiring less
wasted time to deliberately drain nodes for larger jobs). So, among a user’s jobs submitted at roughly the same time,
a larger job may run first, if the number of nodes necessary for the larger job is already available.
HPC Hardware and Configuration
The HPC Cluster consists of two login nodes and many compute (aka execute)
nodes. All users log in at a login node, and all user files on the shared file sytem are accessible on all nodes.
Additionally, all nodes are tightly networked (56 Gbit/s Infiniband) so
they can work together as a single "supercomputer", depending on the
number of CPUs you specify.
Operating System and Software
All nodes in the HPC Cluster are running CentOS 7 Linux.
The SLURM scheduler version is 20.02.2.
To see more details of other software on the cluster, see the HPC Software page.
Login Nodes
The two login nodes for the cluster are:
hpclogin1.chtc.wisc.edu
hpclogin2.chtc.wisc.edu
For more details on logging in, see the “Connecting to CHTC” guide linked above.
Execute Nodes and Partitions
Only execute nodes will be used for performing your computational work.
The execute nodes are organized into several "partitions", including
the univ2, pre, and int partitions which are available to
all HPC users as well as research group specific partitions that consist
of researcher-owned hardware and which all HPC users can access on a
backfill capacity via the pre partition (more details below).
Partition
p-name
# nodes (N)
t-max
t-default
max nodes/job
cores/node (n)
RAM/node (GB)
University 2
univ2
148
7 days
1 day
16
20
128
Interactive
int
6
4 hrs
1 hr
1
20
128
Pre-emptable (backfill)
pre
316
24 hrs
4 hrs
16
20
128
Owners
unique
124
7 days
24 hrs
unique
20
128
Astronomy Dept (differs)
astro3
24
4 days
24 hrs
16
20
128
univ2 consists of our second generation compute nodes, each with 20
CPU cores of 2.5 GHz and 128 GB of RAM. Jobs submitted to this partition
can request and use up to 7 days of running time.
int consists of two compute nodes is intended for short and immediate interactive
testing on a single node (up to 16 CPUs, 64 GB RAM). Jobs submitted to this partition
can run for up to 1 hour.
pre (i.e. pre-emptable) is an under-layed partition encompassing all HPC Cluster
nodes and is intended for more immediate turn-around of shorter, smaller, and/or
interactive sessions requiring more than the 30-minute limit of the int partition.
Jobs submitted to pre are run as back-fill on any idle nodes, including researcher-owned
compute nodes, meaning these jobs may be pre-empted by higher priority
jobs. By default, pre-empted jobs will be re-queued (to run again) if they were submitted with
an sbatch script.
Data Storage and Management
Data space in the HPC Cluster filesystem is not backed-up and should be
treated as temporary by users. Only files necessary for
actively-running jobs should be kept on the filesystem, and files
should be removed from the cluster when jobs complete. A primary copy of any
essential files (e.g. software, submit files, input) should be kept in an
alternate, non-CHTC storage location.
Each user will receive two primary data storage locations:
/home/username with an initial disk quota of 100GB
and 10,000 items. With the exception of software, all of the files
needed for your work, such as input, output, configuration files, etc.
should be located in your /home directory.
/software/username with an initial disk quota of 10GB and
100,000 items. All software, library, etc. installtions should
be written to and located in your /software directory.
To check how many files and directories you have in
your /home or /software directory see the
instructions below.
Increased quotas on either of these locations are available upon email
request to chtc@cs.wisc.edu after a user has
cleared out old data and run relevant test jobs to inform the request. In your request,
please include both size (in GB) and file/directory counts. If you don't
know how many files your installation creates, because it's more than
the current items quota, simply indicate that in your request.
CHTC Staff reserve the right to remove any significant amounts of data
on the HPC Cluster in our efforts to maintain filesystem performance
for all users.
Local scratch space of 500 GB is available on each execute node in
/scratch/local/$USER and is automatically cleaned out upon completion
of scheduled job sessions (interactive or non-interactive). Local
scratch is available on the login nodes, hpclogin1 and hpclogin2, also at
/scratch/local/$USER and should be cleaned out by the user upon completion of
compiling activities. CHTC staff will otherwise clean this location of
the oldest files when it reaches 80% capacity.
Tools for managing home and software space
You can use the command get_quotas to see what disk
and items quotas are currently set for a given directory path.
This command will also let you see how much disk is in use and how many
items are present in a directory:
When ncdu has finished running, the output will give you a total file
count and allow you to navigate between subdirectories for even more
details. Type q when you're ready to exit the output viewer. More
info here: https://lintut.com/ncdu-check-disk-usage/
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