Working on Digital Research Alliance of Canada Clusters

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada, or the Alliance, (formerly Compute Canada) is the organization that coordinates access to High Performance Computing (HPC) computing resources across Canada.

Before you can use the Alliance compute clusters and high capacity storage resources you need to Create Digital Research Alliance of Canada & WestGrid Accounts. You only need to do that once when you join the MOAD group, no matter how many different compute clusters you end up working on.

For each cluster that you work on, you need to do some initial setup. Our Alliance allocation that gives us higher than default priority for compute, and larger project and nearline storage allocations is on the graham.computecanada.ca cluster located in Waterloo. The instructions below are for setup on graham.

We also have default allocations available on:

  • beluga.computecanada.ca, located in Montréal.

  • cedar.computecanada.ca, located in Burnaby.

  • narval.computecanada.ca, located in Montréal.

Our jobs generally do not require sufficient resources to qualify to run on the niagara.computecanada.ca cluster located in Toronto.

Create Digital Research Alliance of Canada & WestGrid Accounts

Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) is the national network of shared advanced research computing (ARC) and storage that we use for most of our ocean model calculations. The BC DRI Group is the regional organization that coordinates the British Columbia partnership with the Alliance.

To access Alliance compute clusters and storage you need to register a Alliance account at https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/account_application. To do so you will need an eoas.ubc.ca email address, and Susan’s Alliance CCRI code.

Note

When prompted to select an institution, choose BC DRI Group: University of British Columbia.

There are detailed information about the account creation process, and step by step instructions (with screenshots) for completing it at https://alliancecan.ca/en/services/advanced-research-computing/account-management/apply-account

Initial Setup on graham.computecanada.ca

These are the setup steps that you need to do when you start using graham for the first time:

  1. Add an entry for graham to your $HOME/.ssh/config file. This will enable you to connect to graham by typing ssh graham instead of having to type ssh your-user-id@graham.computecanada.ca.

    Create a $HOME/.ssh/config file on your Waterhole machine containing the following (or append the following if $HOME/.ssh/config already exists):

    Host graham
  Hostname  graham.computecanada.ca
  User  userid
  ForwardAgent  yes

    where userid is your Alliance user id.

    The first two lines establish graham as a short alias for graham.computecanada.ca so that you can just type ssh graham.

    The third line sets the user id to use on graham, which is convenient if it differs from your EOAS user id.

    The last line enables agent forwarding so that authentication requests received on the remote system are passed back to your laptop or Waterhole machine for handling. That means that connections to GitHub (for instance) in your session on graham will be authenticated by your laptop or Waterhole machine. So, after you type your ssh key passphrase into your laptop or Waterhole machine once, you should not have to type it again until you log off and log in again.

  2. Copy your ssh public key into your $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys file on graham and set the permissions on that file so that only you can read, write, or delete it. The ssh-copy-id command makes that a lot easier than it sounds:

    $ ssh-copy-id -i $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa graham

    You should see output like (except that /home/dlatorne/.ssh/id_rsa.pub in the 1st line should show your EOAS user id, not Doug’s):

    /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: INFO: Source of key(s) to be installed: "/home/dlatorne/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"
The authenticity of host 'graham.computecanada.ca (199.241.166.2)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:mf1jJ3ndpXhpo0k38xVxjH8Kjtq3o1+ZtTVbeM0xeCk.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

    Type yes to accept the fingerprint from graham. Then you should see output like (again with your user id, not Doug’s):

    /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: INFO: Source of key(s) to be installed: "/home/dlatorne/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"
/usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: INFO: attempting to log in with the new key(s), to filter out any that are already installed
/usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: INFO: 1 key(s) remain to be installed -- if you are prompted now it is to install the new keys
dlatorne@graham.computecanada.ca's password:

    Type in your Alliance password. The output should continue login messages from graham, concluding with:

    Number of key(s) added: 1

Now try logging into the machine, with:   "ssh graham"
and check to make sure that only the key(s) you wanted were added.

    Finally, as the output above suggests, confirm that you can ssh into graham with

    $ ssh graham

    No userid, password, or lengthy host name required! :-)

  3. Create a PROJECT environment variable that points to our allocated storage on the /project/ file system. To ensure that PROJECT is set correctly every time you sign in to graham, use an editor to add the following line to your $HOME/.bash_profile file:

    export PROJECT=$HOME/projects/def-allen

    Exit your session on graham with exit, then ssh in again, and confirm that PROJECT is set correctly with:

    $ echo $PROJECT

    The output should be:

    /home/dlatorne/projects/def-allen/

    except with your Alliance userid instead of Doug’s.

  4. Set the permissions in your $PROJECT/$USER/ directory so that other members of the def-allen group have access, and permissions from the top-level directory are inherited downward in the tree:

    $ cd $PROJECT/$USER
$ chmod g+rwxs .
$ chmod o+rx .

    Check the results of those operations with ls -al $PROJECT/$USER. They should look like:

    $ ls -al $PROJECT/$USER
total 90
drwxrwsr-x  3 dlatorne def-allen 33280 Apr  9 15:04 ./
drwxrws--- 16 allen    def-allen 33280 Apr  8 18:14 ../

    with your user id instead of Doug’s in the ./ line.

  5. Set the group and permissions in your $SCRATCH/ directory so that other members of the def-allen group have access, and permissions from the top-level directory are inherited downward in the tree:

    $ cd $SCRATCH
$ chgrp def-allen .
$ chmod g+rwxs .
$ chmod o+rx .

    Check the results of those operations with ls -al $SCRATCH. They should look like:

    $ ls -al $SCRATCH
total 3015
drwxrwsr-x    26 dlatorne def-allen   41472 Apr 26 17:23 ./
drwxr-xr-x 16366 root     root      2155008 Apr 29 15:31 ../

    with your user id instead of Doug’s in the ./ line.

  6. Follow the Git Configuration docs to create your $HOME/.gitconfig Git configuration file.

  7. Alliance clusters use the module load command to load software components. On graham the module loads that are required to build and run NEMO are:

module load StdEnv/2020
module load netcdf-fortran-mpi/4.5.2
module load perl/5.30.2
module load python/3.9.6

You can manually load the modules each time you log in, or you can add the above lines to your $HOME/.bashrc file so that they are automatically loaded upon login.

Note

If you need to use the Compute Canada StdEnv/2016.4 environment that was the default prior to 1-Apr-2021, you should use the following module loads instead:

module load StdEnv/2016.4
module load netcdf-fortran-mpi/4.4.4
module load perl/5.22.4
module load python/3.8.2

  1. Follow the docs for the project that you are working on to set up your $PROJECT/$USER/ workspace and clone the repositories required to build and run NEMO:

  2. Follow the docs for the project you are working on to build XIOS-2:

  3. Follow the docs for the project you are working on to build NEMO-3.6: