Alice Wiki Pages

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

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

Leiden University network maintenance on 20/21 November

Maintenance on the network of Leiden University will take place on the weekend of 20/21 November. The official announcement from the University can be found on the University webpage.

During this time ALICE will continue to run, but in total isolation, i.e., with no internet access. This means that you will not be able to login to ALICE and jobs cannot for example pull code, download data or access license servers.

We will use this page to provide updates on the status of the cluster.

If you have any question, please contact the ALICE Helpdesk.

Previous Maintenance days

ALICE node status

CPU nodes: Node015 is out-of-service

Gateway: UP
Head node: UP
Login nodes: UP
GPU nodes: UP
CPU nodes: Up (except for node015)
High memory nodes: UP
Storage: UP
Network: UP

Current Issues

Node015 out of service:
- Node015 is out of service because of technical issues. We are in contact with our vendor.
- Status: Work in Progress
- Last Updated: 30 Nove 2021, 14:58 CET

Copying data to the shared scratch via sftp:
- There is currently an issue on the sftp gateway which does prevents users from copying data to their shared scratch directory, i.e., /home/<username>/data
- A current work-around is to use scp or sftp via the ssh gateway and the login nodes.
- Status: Work in Progress
- Last Updated: 30 Nov 2021, 14:56 CET

See here for other recently solved issues: Solved Issues

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.

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.

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.