The teaching cluster

The Teaching cluster is used to support teaching courses, especially MSc courses and the Machine Learning Practical.

The teaching cluster has 200 GPUs (NVIDIA GTX1060 6GB) in 25 servers(landonia[01-25]).
Physically, it's split between three sites, so if one site goes down, two thirds of the cluster should still be operational.

How to get access

Undergraduate and taught MSC Students will get access based on the courses they are on. PGR students and staff will get low priority access when the nodes are not being used for a taught class.
To use the cluster for a project, please ask your supervisor to create a Computing Support ticket giving details of the project.

• ⇒ Create a Computing Support ticket.

How to use the cluster

Use of this cluster is controlled by Slurm. First ssh to the head node (mlp) then use Slurm commands.

• ⇒ The Slurm job scheduler.

Here's how to use a cluster without breaking it:

• ⇒ GPU cluster tips.

Files and backups

• Jobs on the compute nodes cannot access your files in AFS. Instead there are home directories on a local distributed filesystem. You can copy files from AFS by logging in to a head node then using the cp command. AFS home directories can be found under /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/user/.
  • ⇒ AFS in Informatics.
• There is no disk quota but space is limited so please delete files you have finished with.
• Your files are NOT backed up. DO NOT USE THIS FILESYSTEM AS THE ONLY STORAGE FOR IMPORTANT DATA. Disk space will be reclaimed once your access has finished. It is your responsibility to make copies of anything you wish to keep. There is some redundancy for disaster recovery.

Software

The cluster runs the standard SL7 version of DICE. If you would like software to be added, please ask Computing Support.

• ⇒ The computing support form.
  
• ⇒ The Software pages.