ALICE User Documentation Wiki v02

Off to research computing Wonderland

ALICE is the computing facility for excellent research of Leiden University. With ALICE you have the world of computing at your fingertips. On this wiki, you can find the information you'll need to get started and become more skilled in using computing to support your research.

For background information, read the About ALICE page.

Please know that this wiki is currently a work in process. We appreciate any questions or comments on the contents so that we can improve the range of information that we supply here.

IMPORTANT NOTE: ALICE is still in a build-up phase. Configurations are still subject to change. You may, therefore, experience unexpected behaviour for the time being.

Use of the ALICE cluster must be acknowledged in any and all publications. For more info see: About ALICE

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Maintenance

This section is used to announce upcoming maintenance and provide information before, during and after it. For general information about our maintenance policy, please have a look here: To maintenance policy

Next Maintenance

The next major maintenance window will be on 8 March 2021.

What are we going to do?

• We will integrate an NVIDA Tesla T4 GPU into login node 2. We have purchased two GPUs, i.e., one for each login node. We will start with login node 2 because there are generally fewer users on it.

What does this mean for you?

• We will have to take login node 2 offline in order to integrate the GPU.
• All active connections, screens or tmux sessions will be terminated.
• We hope that we can bring login node 2 back until noon.
• After a testing phase, we will make the T4 available and announce details on it use.

Do you have questions?

Please contact the (ALICE Helpdesk)

Previous Maintenance days

• 01 Feb 2021
• 02 Nov 2020
• 05 Oct. 2020

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Getting Started

If you're new to ALICE, please check out the Getting Started page.

Gaining access

Access to the cluster and file transfer are done via SSH and SCP/SFTP. Select one of the below links for more detail or click on the heading of the paragraph for a full overview.

• Getting an account
• Login to ALICE
• Public key authentication
• Accessible file storage
• File transfer

Access Policy

Access needs to be granted actively (by the creation of an account on the cluster by the ALICE Cluster workgroup. Use of resources is limited by the scheduler. Depending on the availability of queues ('partitions') granted to a user, priority to the system's resources is regulated on the basis of Faculty/institute/PI levels.

Software

Cluster Monitoring Software and Scheduler

ALICE uses Bright Cluster Manager software for overall cluster management and Slurm as the scheduler.

• Monitor cluster status with BCM
• Ganglia Cluster Monitoring
• Compose, submit and manage jobs with Slurm
• Running interactive jobs

Installed software

Globally installed software, modules

Cluster configuration

Find here a hardware description of the ALICE cluster.

Frequently Asked Questions

Find here a list of frequently asked questions for the ALICE cluster.