RSS Feed New User's Guide
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company. The Center was established in 1986 and is supported by several funding agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.
PSC operates a Cray XT3 MPP system, bigben.psc.edu, and two SGI Altix SMP systems, pople.psc.edu and salk.psc.edu. The Center also provides machines that serve as front-end interfaces to these supercomputers. These machines run the Linux operating systems.
About this Guide
This guide introduces you to PSC's supercomputing environment and is intended to help you get started using the Center's facilities. These chapters are included:
- The Computing Environment at PSC
- Accessing PSC's Machines
- Using Online Information Tools
- Frequently Used Commands
- Getting Help
Please take particular note of the online information tools documented in Chapter 3, as we provide the majority of our documentation online.
1. The Computing Environment at PSC
Cray XT3
The XT3, bigben.psc.edu, is a Cray XT3 MPP system comprising 2068 compute nodes connected by a custom-designed interconnection network. Each node contains two 2.6-Ghz AMD Opteron processors. Each processor has its own 1 Gbyte of memory.
There are multiple front end processors, which are also AMD Opteron processors.
pople.psc.edu and salk.psc.edu
Pople and salk are SGI Altix 4700 shared-memory NUMA systems. Pople comprises 192 blades; salk, 36 blades. Each blade holds 2 Itanium2 Montvale 9130M dual-core processors. The four cores on a blade share 8 Gybtes of local memory. The processors are connected by a NUMAlink interconnect. Through this interconnect the local memory on each processor is accessible to all the other processors. Each processor runs an enhanced version of the SuSE Linux operating system.
There are multiple frontend processors, which are also Itanium2 processors and which run the same version of SuSE Linux as the compute processors. You login to one of these frontend processors, not to the compute processors.
Pople is available to researchers affiliated with U.S. institutions. Salk is dedicated to biomedical research.
The Linux Front End
To facilitate work on the supercomputers, PSC provides a machine that serves as a front end. This machine is used typically for code development, keeping the supercomputers free for production work.
pscuxa.psc.edu is a 1.7GHz Athlon system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It uses the AFS file system.
Mass Storage
To support the file system needs of users, we have developed a mass storage system. This system is a combination tape-and-disk system and is named golem.psc.edu and is used as a file archiver only, not for computing. The far program or kerberized ftp can be used for storing or retrieving files from this system.
2. Accessing PSC Machines
When you receive a grant from PSC, accounts are created for you on the supercomputer you specified in your proposal and on the Center's Linux front end.
The User Notification form that you received in the mail contains your login information and initial password. PLEASE DO NOT LOSE THIS FORM. You will need to refer to it in the event that we need to reset your password on one of those machines.
Please also read the PSC password policies.
The following section describes how to connect to PSC machines via the Internet. For information on transferring files, refer to the Center's World Wide Web server, described in chapter 3, "Using Online Information Tools", below.
Note: UNIX machines are case sensitive. When connecting to those machines, use capitals only where explicitly indicated.
2.1 Internet Machine Names and Addresses
Via the Internet you can use the ssh command to connect interactively to any PSC machine on which you have an account. To establish a connection, type:
ssh machine-name
You will be prompted for your userid and password. Once you've entered this information, you'll gain access to the machine.
| Machine | Name | |
|---|---|---|
| XT3 | bigben.psc.edu | |
| SGI Altix | pople.psc.edu salk.psc.edu | |
| linux front end | pscuxa.psc.edu |
3. Using Online Information Tools
Since system upgrades and enhancements occur on an ongoing basis, it is almost impossible to keep hardcopy documentation up to date. The turnaround time needed to update and distribute new documentation can often leave users with out-of-date manuals. To combat this problem, we provide as much information as possible online through the following facilities:
- web pages;
- bulletin boards; and
- UNIX man pages
3.1 Multimedia Information System
Most of our user documentation can be found in the PSC web site, www.psc.edu.
3.2 Bulletin Boards
One of PSC's primary means of communicating important information to users is through its bulletin board facilities. See http://www.psc.edu/general/help/bulletins.php for details on accessing the bulletin boards.
3.3 MAN Command
On any PSC UNIX-based system, information about most commands and software is available via the standard UNIX man command:
man command-name
which displays information about the command to the screen.
If you don't know the exact name of the command you want but you know the subject matter, you can use the -k switch. For example, to find out the name of the FORTRAN compiler, you could type:
man -k fortran
This command would print out a list of all commands whose man-page definition includes the word "fortran."
4. Frequently Used Commands
Below are some of the more commonly used UNIX commands.
| Function | UNIX command |
|---|---|
| Change password | passwd |
| Copy a file | cp file1 file2 |
| Delete a file | rm filename |
| Type a file to the screen, one page at a time | more filename |
| List contents of current directory | ls |
| Change directories | cd directory |
| Search a document | grep pattern document |
| Logout | logout or ctrl-d |
5. Getting Help
5.1 Consulting Assistance
In addition to our online information tools described in the previous section, PSC provides users with excellent consulting assistance. Staff consultants are available during normal business hours. At other times, student consultants will handle your questions and, if necessary, refer them to a staff consultant for further investigation. Our phones are staffed Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Eastern time).
Please contact PSC if you have any questions or comments regarding policies or procedures. Our address is:
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
300 S. Craig Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
For time-critical problems, you can reach our User Services department at:
Pittsburgh area: 412-268-6350
United States: 800-221-1641
When you need assistance, please supply us with the nature of the problem, the name of the machine you were using, the date and time that the problem occurred, and the location of any relevant job or output files.
For problems that are not time-critical, you can send electronic mail to remarks@psc.edu.
5.2 Additional PSC Contacts
- General information
- http://www.psc.edu/
412-268-4960 - For information on the Corporate Program, contact:
- Corporate Relations
http://www.psc.edu/corporate
corp-relations@psc.edu - For information on allocations/grants, contact:
-
Allocations Coordinator
http://www.psc.edu/grants
grants@psc.edu - For information concerning workshops, off-site workshops, or workshop application procedures, please contact:
-
Workshop Coordinator
http://www.psc.edu/training
workshop@psc.edu - For information regarding biomedical workshops or the NRBSC, contact:
-
NRBSC Coordinator
http://www.nrbsc.org/
cbanks@psc.edu - For copies of PSC publications such as overviews, newsletters, and science books, contact:
- Vivian Benton, Publications Coordinator
http://www.psc.edu/publications/publications.php
benton@psc.edu