Quick guide for researchers to connect to the Informatics Compute Facility (ICF) GPU cluster. See links for more information.
Quick Start
If not using eduroam or the university network, then connect to a university VPN
Open a terminal on Linux, on a mac or on windows.
Connect to an ssh gateway such as
ssh UUN@student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk using your DICE password.
From there go to the head node (hastings) of the ICF cluster, which includes the Research cluster, using ssh icf
Use sinfo to see the partitions (queues) where jobs can be queued until resources are free on their associated compute nodes. To display the types of GPUs and their partition/node the following could be used: sinfo -N -O partition,nodelist,gres:40
Check that the slurm job scheduler can start an interactive session on a node: srun --partition=ICF-Free --pty bash (Note this has not requested any GPUs; for one of any type add --gres=gpu:1 while --gres=gpu:nvidia_l40s:1 would request one L40 GPU.)
Type exit when you want to end the interactive session. You could next type logout to leave the icf, then logout of the ssh gateway.
A more in-depth guide for researchers connecting to the ICF is available here.