Guide de démarrage

Vous venez tout juste de recevoir votre compte de Calcul Canada. Bienvenue! Maintenant, quoi en faire? Ce guide a pour but de vous aider à vous retrouver dans la documentation technique des différents systèmes et services de Calcul Canada.

Pour savoir comment obtenir un compte Calcul Canada, consultez Demander un compte.

Que voulez-vous faire?

Si vous

• êtes déjà un utilisateur expérimenté des systèmes de CHP et que vous êtes prêt à vous connecter à une grappe, allez à la section suivante, soit "Quelles ressources sont disponibles?"
• voulez vous former par vous-même, vous pouvez
  • lire à propos de comment vous connecter par SSH à nos systèmes de CHP.
  • lire une introduction à l'utilisation des systèmes Linux.
  • lire à propos de comment transférer des fichiers vers et de nos systèmes.
  • chercher un atelier de formation dans ce calendrier d'événements
• voulez savoir quels logiciels et quelles ressources matérielles sont disponibles pour différentes disciplines, nous avons prévu créer un guide par discipline:
  • Visualisation
• avez des centaines de gigaoctets de données à transférer à travers le réseau, veuillez lire à propos du service de transfert Globus
• voulez utiliser des logiciels qui ne sont pas faits pour performer sur nos systèmes traditionnels de CHP, vous devriez lire à propos du Service d'infonuagique CC-Cloud

Pour toute autre question, vous pouvez essayer la boîte de recherche dans le coin en haut à droite de la présente page, visiter la page d’accueil de la documentation technique ou encore de nous joindre par courriel.

What resources are available?

Compute Canada is currently installing several million dollars’ worth of new computers while simultaneously retiring many old computers. During the transition period (2016-2018), a changing mix of old and new computers will be available to you. You can read about the progress of the migration from old to new systems here.

New resources (deployed in 2016 or after)

Compute Canada has begun to renew its infrastructure starting in 2016. The first phase of the new deployment is composed of four new clusters, called Arbutus (GP1), Cedar (GP2), Graham (GP3) and Niagara (LP). Arbutus, an extension of West cloud, has all its additional compute nodes install and is awaiting some additional storage. While the details are still subject to change Cedar (GP2) and Graham (GP3) will be general purpose clusters composed of a variety of nodes including large memory nodes and nodes with accelerators, and Niagra (LP) will be a large parallel cluster with nodes interconnected by a fast network.

Legacy resources (deployed before 2016)

Computing resources which were installed between 2004 and 2015 and are scheduled to be decommissioned in the next few years are referred to as legacy resources. The legacy resources are administered by regional organizations, one of ACENET, the Centre for Advanced Computing, Calcul Québec, SciNet, SHARCNET, and WestGrid. To use a legacy resource you must have an account with one of these entities, which you can do through this page. Resources deployed during and after 2016 will not require this step, nor do the two clouds.

Most legacy clusters are classified as either capacity clusters or capability clusters. Capacity clusters contain nodes connected to each other by a relatively slow Ethernet network, while the capability clusters have a fast network, usually InfiniBand. Large parallel jobs will run better on capability clusters than capacity clusters, while smaller jobs will run almost anywhere.

There are some specialty clusters among the legacy resources. Applications which require more than 512 GB or memory per node require large shared memory systems. Compute Canada has four such systems:

• Hungabee hosted by WestGrid
• M9000 hosted by the Centre for Advanced Computing
• Guillimin-ScaleMP hosted by Calcul Québec
• Fortier hosted by SHARCNET

Compute Canada also has clusters equipped with accelerators such as GPUs and Intel Xeon Phis. If your application benefits from such accelerators, you will find them on the following legacy systems:

• Helios, Hades and Guillimin, hosted by Calcul Québec
• Parallel, hosted by WestGrid
• Angel and Monk, hosted by SHARCNET
• Accelerator Research Cluster, hosted by SciNet

All of these have NVidia GPUs. Guillimin also has Intel Xeon Phis.

Finally, Compute Canada also hosts two clouds called East Cloud and West Cloud, as well as storage resources ranging from fast parallel filesystems to tape backup.

"What resources should I use?"

This question is hard to answer because of the range of needs Compute Canada serves, and because of the enormous variety of resources we have available --- especially during the 2016-2018 renewal period. If the descriptions above are insufficient, contact Compute Canada’s technical support or your regional support.

In order to identify the best resource to use, we may ask many questions about what you want to do. Such questions will probably include:

• What software do you want to use?
  • Does it require a commercial license?
  • Can it be used in a non-interactive fashion? That is, can the software’s execution be controlled from a file which is prepared prior to its execution rather than through the use of a graphical interface?
  • Can it run on the Linux operating system?
• How much memory, time, computing power, accelerators, storage, network bandwidth and so forth --- are required by a typical job? Rough estimates are fine.
• How frequently will you need to run this kind of job?

You may know the answer to these questions or not. If you do not, our technical support team is there to help you find the answers. Then they will be able to direct you to the most appropriate resources for your needs.