info specific to sutton, rondeau, pelee

A CFI proposal by Profs. Stastna, Poulin, and Lamb resulted in acquisition of new servers in late 2023.

Hostnames and Hardware

• sutton.math.private.uwaterloo.ca (Dell R7625)
  • 2 AMD EPYC 9454 2.75 GHz 48-core CPUs, 768 GB RAM, ~90 TB storage
• pelee.math.private.uwaterloo.ca (Dell XE8545)
  • 2x AMD EPYC 7713 2.0 GHz 64-core CPUs, 1 TB RAM, four NVIDIA A100 40 GB GPUs
• rondeau.math.private.uwaterloo.ca (Dell XE8545)
  • same as pelee

Operating System Software and vendor add-ons

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

System Administration

• MFCF administers these machines. Users do not have root access.
• System management is done by SaltStack software, unlike hood which is managed using MFCF's XHier
  • this means things will be different
  • applications are not under the /software directory anymore
  • default PATH does not have everything in it
  • details below

File Systems

• home directories are NFS-mounted from sutton
  • that's where you are when you log in
  • do not run models from your home directory: it's too small
• the old /fsys2, /fsys3, /fsys4, /fsys5, /fsys6, /fsys7 file systems are NFS-mounted from hood.math
  • these are under /mnt/autofs/hood.math/
  • just 'cd' there and they will appear
• /fsys1 and /fsys2 are large file systems on sutton exported by NFS to the others
  • these are under /mnt/autofs/sutton.math/
  • just 'cd' there and they will appear
• /scratch is a large file system on bow exported by NFS to the others
  • this is under /mnt/autofs/bow.math/
  • just 'cd' there and it appears
• /local_scratch is a 3.4 TB local file system on each of pelee and rondeau
  • this will be fastest for saving output of model runs
  • when done, copy important results elsewhere (i.e. fsysN) for safekeeping and delete from /local_scratch so there's room for others to do their runs
• if you don't have a personal directory in these various places, ask MFCF

Application Software, Development Environment

Wherever satisfactory versions are provided by the OS distribution, things like library and include files are installed at default locations such as /usr/lib64 and /usr/include.

Third party applications are installed as modules under /opt. Run the command module avail to see what's available.

Login shell environment

• the recommended .cshrc and .profile files set up your environment automatically with recommended compilers, libraries, etc. mentioned below to work with the configuration files included with models such as SPINS, MITgcm, IGW
  • see the Login script wiki page for details
• some optional software comes in "module" format (see man module)
  • to see a list of available modules, run module avail
    • this also shows which ones you have loaded already
  • load one using its exact name as shown in the list e.g. MATLAB, module load matlab/2022b-research
  • use module unload modulename to unload a module, e.g. if you want to switch to an alternative one

Compilers

• gcc 11.4 is in standard search rules, no need to load it with a module command

MPI environments

• MPICH is not installed yet. Let MFCF know if it is needed.

• OpenMPI 4.1.2

MATLAB

• version 2202b
• module load matlab/2022b-research
• check module avail to see available versions

Python

• default python3 is 3.10.x
• NumPY, SciPY, etc. are installed
• you can install other packages, such as matplotlib, via: pip3 install --user matplotlib

Models

• MIT GCM - in progress
  • eventually, see config file called sutton_gcc_openmpi in the MITgcm section of the main Models page in this wiki
  • ensure you call genmake2 with the -mpi flag

• NCL NCARG - not installed yet
  • set environment variable NCARG_ROOT to /opt/ncl-6.4.0 and add $NCARG_ROOT/bin to your $PATH
  • optionally, make a .hluresfile in your home directory if you want to customize your NCL graphical environment

• SPINS - coming soon
  • spins2netcdf SPINS to NetCDF converter not installed yet

Visualization

• ParaView - 5.10.1
  • module load paraview/5.10.1

• VisIT - not installed yet

• FFMPEG 4.4.x
  • in standard search rules

• the ImageMagick suite
  • commands such as 'display' and 'convert'; see "man imagemagick"

GPU computing

• pelee and rondeau have GPUs and the CUDA development environment
  • module load cuda/12.3.2
  • use module avail to check for other versions