What is this page for?
This page contains documentation aimed at Alpha testers and other early access users of Comet.
If you have been contacted and asked if you would like to have early access to Comet in advance of the roll out to the wider University research community, then this page will detail the process of getting access to the facility as well as describing the limitations and restrictions which are in place during this early access period.
Dear
As you have expressed interest in being either an early-access user or a Beta tester for Comet, we are writing to let you know that we have finally completed Acceptance testing. The system has proven stable and all of the tested software features (Slurm, Open OnDemand, Containers etc) work repeatably. This means we are ready to commence Alpha testing.
By Alpha testing, we mean that a select group of users will perform very free-form, unsupported testing with the understanding that all work will be wiped before we go into production - you are free to try any of your own code, run any of the installed applications and generally make use of any available resources. However, there are further restrictions/limitations, including:
* You will not be available to access any of your existing Rocket groups
* You will not have access to any per-project data directories (e.g./nobackup/proj/NAME
), and will share a common 'test' folder
* You cannot register further members of your teams
* The system will be subject to ongoing changes which may mean that your work / jobs / processing may be interrupted - it is therefore unsuitable for running production work
* We will not accept feature change requests or requests for additional software packages during this period
* Not all software will be installed (e.g. Docker and some additional software packages are still being worked on), but most common/core software is available
We must be very clear that we (RSE) cannot offer tech support during this period, beyond getting you logged in, as we are still heavily occupied by ongoing integration work to take Comet from a prototype to a fully working production system.
While Alpha testing goes on, we will be developing and setting up the management tools to allow accounting, billing, project creation and maintenance so that the Beta testing phase will run as in production, with separate projects. During Beta testing we will test project creation and user management, project migration from Rocket and billing for resource usage, again with the understanding that everything is 'at risk' until we finally go into production mode. The later Beta testing phase will be much more representative of the full production facility.
If you are interested in helping us with the Alpha testing phase and using the available resources prior to Beta testing, please email us at hpc.researchcomputing@newcastle.ac.uk.
If you wish, you may elect to swap out your invitation to the early access Alpha testing phase for an alternate academic member of staff / RA / RSE or similar, but we cannot extend the list of invitees at this point.
If you want to find out more about early access to Comet, we have further details for you here:
* https://hpc.researchcomputing.ncl.ac.uk/dokuwiki/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=advanced:comet_alpha_testers
Finally, if you have not studied the information previously, we would like to point you to the new HPC Portal and documentation material created specifically to support Comet and future HPC facilities:
* https://hpc.researchcomputing.ncl.ac.uk
Kind Regards,
John Snowdon, Jannetta Steyn, Carol Booth
RSE-HPC Support Team
hpc.researchcomputing@newcastle.ac.uk
First, read the email invitation thoroughly - if you have questions about the Comet facility they can likely be answered by a section in our new HPC Support wiki:
If you have read and understood the invite, then reply to the email and we will send you instructions which detail:
Experienced HPC or Linux users only!
If not already clear, then we expect all users taking part in Alpha testing to either be competent HPC users, know how to use the Slurm scheduler, be comfortable using advanced Linux command line tools, use Linux container tools, or know how to drive Matlab, R Studio or Jupyter without help.
This phase of access to Comet is not for new users to HPC or those without existing, substantial, Linux command-line experience.
All of the core HPC functionality is in place and has been well tested. We also have a number of new features not previously available on University HPC facilities before:
module avail
)Before accepting the invitation to get early access to Comet, please read and understand the restrictions which are in place.
/nobackup/proj/comettestgroup1
)We would like to request that all feedback / bugs / experiences during your early-access use of system to be submitted as issues to the Comet Early Access Github repository:
Tickets/emails set to ITServicedesk / NUService relating to Alpha testing will not be actioned.