In this page:
Since our HPC systems are shared among many users, long production jobs should be submitted using a scheduler. This guarantees that the access to our resources is as fair as possible.
Roughly, there are two different modes to use an HPC system:
- interactive, for data movement, archiving, code development, compilations, basic debugger usage: also for very short test runs and general interactive operations. A task in this class should not exceed 10 minutes CPU-time and is free of charge on HPC systems with the current billing policy.
batch, for production runs. Users must prepare a shell script containing all the operations to be executed in batch mode, once the requested resources are available and assigned to the job. The job then starts and executes on compute nodes of the cluster. Remember to put all your data, programs and scripts in the $WORK or $CINECA_SCRATCH filesystem, which are the best storage areas accessible to execution nodes.
You must have valid active projects on the system in order to run batch jobs. Moreover, remember that on our systems there may be specific policies for the use of project budgets.
On all of our current HPC systems, the queuing system or scheduler is SLURM. The usage of slurm is described in a separate section under this chapter, details are given for every single platform in the platform specific page.
The Software Catalog
CINECA offers a variety of third-party applications and community codes that are installed on its HPC systems. Most of third-party software is installed using software modules mechanism (see "The module command" later in this section).
Information of the available packages and their detailed descriptions can be viewed in the full catalog or organised by discipline in our web site (http://www.hpc.cineca.it/content/resources/) by selecting "software" and "Application Software for Science" or can be obtained when working interactively on the HPC systems, using the module/modmap command (see later in this chapter).
If you do not find an application you are interested in on our web site or on the specific system or if you have a question about software that is currently available, please contact our specialists (superc@cineca.it).
The "module" command
All software programs installed on the CINECA machines (see "The Software Catalog" previous in this section) are available as modules.
A basic default modules environment is already set up by the system login configuration files.
In order to have a list of available modules and select a specific one, you have to use the module command. The following table contains its basic options:
Command Action
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module avail ......... show the available modules on the machine
module load <appl> ... load the module <appl> in the current shell session, preparing the environment for the application.
module help <appl> ... show specific information and basic help on the application
module list .......... show the modules currently loaded on the shell session
module purge ......... unload all the loaded modules
module unload <app>... unload a specific module
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As you will see by typing "module avail", the software modules are collected in different profiles (base, advanced....) and organized by functional category (compilers, libraries, tools, applications,..).
In order to detect all profiles, categories and modules available on both Marconi and Galileo the command “modmap” is available. The information of all versions installed of the software of interest, and in which profile you can find them, just check:
> modmap -m <namesoftware>
ATTENTION: Remember to load the needed modules in batch scripts too, before using the related applications.
Backup policies
The $HOME filesystem is guaranteed by daily backups. In the following the standard backup policies are reported; in particular cases, a different agreement is possible: contact the HPC support (superc@cineca.it) for further details.
The backup procedure runs daily and we preserve a maximum of three different copies of the same file. Older versions are kept for 1 month. The last version of deleted files is kept for 2 months, then definitely removed from the backup archive.