- How to request access
- What we need to know
- What we do
- What to tell the participants
- Participants who undertake a project
If you wish to use the SCITAS clusters for an undergraduate or masters course then please read the following guide on the steps to follow.
How to request access
All requests should be submitted via this form and you will then be contacted by a member of the SCITAS team.
What we need to know
The most important things for us are:
The name of an LDAP group that contains the list of participants
You need to create a group using groups.epfl.ch that contains all the participants including teaching assistants.
The group must be public! The Manage attributes option on the group page allows you to do this.
What type of resources you need
Do you need a specific architecture or accelerators such as GPUs? Will you be running multi-node jobs using MPI?
If you have a preference for a particular cluster then let us know although we may not always be able to respect this choice.
When you need the resources
When is the course given and do students need access to the resources outwith these periods?
What we do
We will give all members of the LDAP group access to the clusters and they will be to use the batch system to submit jobs.
If the course has practical sessions we will create a reservation for these periods to ensure that you have access to sufficient resources.
If access is required for a longer period the group will be given an allocation on the clusters and this will be dimensioned to as to give the participants access to sufficient resources.
We will provide you with the name of the course account for the batch system along with the reservation name if appropriate.
If you have a reservation then it will normally begin one hour before the time requested. Please use this period to test that things work as expected!
What to tell the participants
Depending on which cluster is to be used the participants will need to connect to one of the login nodes as explained at:
https://scitas-data.epfl.ch/confluence/display/DOC/Connecting+to+the+clusters
Every participant has scratch space at /scratch/<username> and this should be used for storing temporary files and writing output.
In addition to the standard options described in our guide to using the clusters the participants should add the following directives to their job scripts
#SBATCH --account=<course account name> #SBATCH --reservation=<reservation name>
Please remind the students that after the course finishes their access will be revoked so they should copy any files that they wish to keep elsewhere.
Participants who undertake a project
If there are participants who carry out a project using the clusters after the end of the course they should apply for an individual student account and explain that it is for a project.