Getting Started at the CAC

For an introduction to parallel computing, computational grids, CAC and NPACI 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. When you get an account from the CAC, you'll get accounts on all of our public machines, currently restricted to nyx (AMD Opteron 64-bit cluster). You can test your code on any of our systems on which you have an account, using the one that provides the best resources for you or that is the least busy.

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.

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 (nyx-login, aon, bighouse).
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
Bighouse

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