The RSE team and academic colleagues have moved to testing higher level application functionality; container technology, interactive applications, 3D visualisation and commercial software packages are installed.
The RSE team and a group of academic staff begin to undertake testing of the base functionality of Comet; authentication, file storage, Slurm job scheduling etc.
Comet hardware was installed, basic operating system functionality and network connectivity implemented.
Please be aware that Rocket, our current High Performance Computing cluster, is end of life and will be replaced in Summer 2025 by a new cluster, named Comet. This means that you would need to migrate your workloads to the new system if you start working on Rocket now.
All users of University HPC facilities must take and pass the HPC Driving Test before accessing the Comet HPC service. If you have previously used Rocket you must still take this test.
Currently, the entire Rocket /nobackup filesystem should be considered at-risk. It is beyond end of life and should only be being used to hold code and data which is currently active and being used to run jobs. There is a very real possibility of failure of this end-of-life filesystem, and this means that you should be prepared to lose code and data at any point. For research data, we strongly recommend you apply for storage on RDW https://services.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/core-services/filestore/research/ the first 5TB are free and the storage is mounted on the Rocket login nodes. Application Form
All code you create to run on the HPC, including batch scheduling jobs and processing scripts, should be version controlled using git. (Not sure about git? Sign up for a git workshop or study the materials at our Training & Workshops page.) GitHub provides backup, enables collaboration, enables transfer to other HPCs and allows you to recover from errors. The University has a subscription to GitHub Enterprise. You should register your account using your University email address @newcastle.ac.uk . Code should be developed on your local machine (PC or laptop), pushed to a remote repository on GitHub and pulled to a clone of the repository inside `/nobackup/proj/<yourproj>`.
NB GitHub is for versioning of text files. It is NOT a full backup solution and is not suitable for storage of data or binary files.