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Getting Started at the CAC

For an introduction to parallel computing, computational grids, CAC and XSEDE resources and how to use them, you'll want to visit our Learning about Parallel and Grid Computing web page.

Getting an Account

When you're ready to start computing, you'll open an account. For students, faculty, and staff in the College of Engineering, there is no fee for getting an account or using the publicly available resources of the CAC, although those resources are very limited.  For more reliable access to resources or for people not affiliated with the College of Engineering, consider using the for-fee campus-wide HPC service known as Flux.

Training

The CAC offers training 3 times a year on a variety of topics. Training is announced on the website and in email to users with valid accounts. If there is a group of 5 or more the CAC will offer an additional training outside the normal schedule, contact the CAC to schedule. All training materials for reference, are available for download.

Using Your Account

Introduction to Batch Computing - a 5 minute movie showing how to get started with the CAC cluster, including how to transfer your data, what a PBS script looks like, and how to submit your job. The example PBS script in the video is incorrect. Use -A cac unless you are a member of a private group, in which case you can use your private group account.

Quick Reference - a reference guide on different commands (unix, pbs, etc) that you'll want to know to use any of the CAC systems.

Video Turorial on basic Linux/Unix commands.

List SFTP/SCP turorials for transfering data between clusters and desktops.

In general, the steps to using the CAC clusters/resources:

  1. Transfer your data to the cluster using scp/sftp.
  2. Login into the login node of the cluster. If you're logging in from off-campus, you'll either want to use the U of M VPN client or ssh to a publicly available login node like login.itd.umich.edu or login.engin.umich.edu, and then from there login to nyx-login.engin.umich.edu.
  3. Write a PBS script that does what you want to accomplish. PBS scripts are shell scripts with some directives for the resource manager (job length, number of processors, amount of memory, etc.) Examples of PBS scripts can be found here.
  4. Submit your job with qsub: qsub name_of_your_pbs_script
  5. Cluster scheduler will find appropriate resources to run your job.
  6. If you set the email flag in your PBS script, you'll receive an email when your job starts and/or ends.
  7. Review your output and scp/sftp that data to your desktop/AFS/etc.

Now that you have an account on one or more of our machines, you'll want to visit the main web pages for our systems (all of our systems require ssh to login):
Nyx
Flux

Or talk to us and we'll help you choose the tools that best address your situation: "Dear CAC, I Have a Question..."