Basics

Overview

The vast majority of the calculations we run are carried out on supercomputers, including those at Princeton. You should bookmark the  Princeton Research Computing Knowledge Base , which has many excellent guides for using the high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

Courtesy

The most important rule is to treat the Princeton Research Computing staff with respect. Abide by the rules, when reporting issues do so with a complete and reproducible example, and be both kind and thankful. They are our colleagues, and you should treat them as such even if you have not met them before in person. Anyone found being rude or disrespectful to a computing staff member will have their compute access temporarily revoked.

Logging In

The Princeton Research Computing webpage has  a guide  for logging into the HPC clusters.
Annoyed at having to use your phone for two-factor authentication all the time? Download  Authy  on your phone to manage all your 2FA codes. Also check out the  Princeton Removing Tedium  repository to minimize the frequency of 2FA checks.

File Transfer

To access and/or transfer files on an HPC machine, the easiest option is to install an SFTP client. For Windows, I strongly recommend  WinSCP . For other operating systems,  Cyberduck  seems to be a popular option. There are, of course, ways to transfer and access files from the command-line ( scp  and  rsync  are the most common methods), but a GUI is often easier in general for this task.

Slurm

Slurm is the job scheduling system on the Princeton HPC machines and most clusters we use. Details about Slurm can be found in  this guide  by Princeton research computing. The  Slurm documentation  also has a useful list of commands.