What now?

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 160 min

Questions

• Can I manage to use ARCHER2 to run one of the exercises?

Objectives

• Run an exercise or Python script of your own on ARCHER2.

Now you know enough about ARCHER2 to explore how to use it for your work or to understand what its potential benefits are you. You may also have ideas around where the barriers and difficulties may lie and have further questions on how you can start using and/or trying ARCHER2 for your work.

This session is designed to give you the opportunity to explore these questions and issues. We recommend that you try to run one of the exercises from the first part of the course on ARCHER2, or possibly even try to use a data analysis script of your own on the system.

The instructors and helpers on the course will be on hand to help and to answer any questions you might have.

Outside this course, you can always seek help on using ARCHER2 by getting in touch with the service desk at support@archer2.ac.uk.

Running an exercise on ARCHER2

At this point you should be able to log in to ARCHER2, install up your custom Python packages, and run jobs.

Remember that you will need to use a job script similar to the one we looked at in the previous lesson. Feel free to copy that script and save it into a directory you create in your ARCHER2 work directories, along with a Python script to do some useful work and any input data required. Make any changes you feel are necessary to that job script before submitting it to Slurm with sbatch. Keep track of it in the scheduler using squeue and by checking the slurm-<jobid>.out file, and if necessary cancel it with scancel.

Once a job has completed successfully, you can transfer any output to your machine using a tool like scp or rsync. If you are connecting with MobaXterm from Windows, you should be able to use the client’s built-in SFTP file transfer using the pane on the left hand side of the GUI.

If you’d prefer to check text output on ARCHER2 itself, remember that you can use the command line tools cat or more or less, or else open the files directly with an editor like vim. If you log in to ARCHER2 with X11 forwarding enabled (using either the -X or -Y options to ssh, or enabling it as an option in MobaXterm), you can also use ImageMagick’s display tool to view images after you’ve loaded the module:

auser@ln01:~> module load imagemagick
auser@ln01:~> display image.jpg

Bear in mind that none of ARCHER2’s file systems are intended for long term storage of data and you should consider anything kept in /work as being at risk. To keep any data you generate safe, you should transfer it off-site and keep backups.

With everything now covered, you can try using this time to try logging in to the ARCHER2 supercomputer, setting up Python, and running a job!

Key Points

• Perform large tasks on ARCHER2 by running jobs on the back end.

• Any files you generate should be transferred to your own local storage and backed up.