Computation Facilities

Currently the Math Dept. has a number of multiprocessor systems available for Math faculty and graduate students to run compute jobs on. Available software includes Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, and TecPlot. An MPI environment for parallel programming is also available. Your Math Dept PID and password is used to access these systems.

All of these servers run Ubuntu linux. You will need to become familiar with the linux command line to make use of them. A Gentle Introduction is located here. If you need further help, please contact Bill Reilly.

In general you will want to have your command run from a terminal session, that you can disconnect from and check on later. You will run the command like

nohup command >& run.out &

This will run a command sending the output to a file called "run.out". You will be able to logout from your terminal (ssh).

Shell server

A virtual server that is available for reading email, accessing personal files and web pages, program compilation, and other command line tasks. This is accessible via ssh or sftp, for file transfer purposes.

Please don't run any large or long computational intensive tasks on ssh.math. These should be run on the tesla, gauss, or ampere.

Ampere

Our computation server with a NVIDA A100 GPU and high speed SSD storage. It has 2 Intel 16 core 3.4 GHz processors, 384 Gig of RAM.

Gauss

Our computation server that utilizes NVIDA cuda technology and high speed SSD storage. It has 4 Intel 15 core 2.8 GHz processors, 1 TB of RAM, and 3 NVIDIA Telsa K40 GPU cards. There is also 11 TB of local SSD storage available. Most of this space is currently unallocated. Please see Bill Reilly about setting up disk space for your computation work.

We also have licenses for Jacket from Accelereyes. This software helps with MATLAB acceleration with GPUs. Please see the Accelereyes web site for more information.

Running programs like Matlab help

If you have matlab programs that will require large amounts of memory or will run for many hours, you would be better off running them on one of the Math Department servers. Your program can run uninterruped for days/weeks like this without tying up your laptop/desktop.

Typically you will want to use a terminal multiplexer so that you run a program, sign off the system freeing up your laptop again, and reattach to it at a later time. Here is a comparision between using Screen or TMUX and some basic inforamation on both.
Chosing a Terminal Multiplexer

An older way of running programs is using the nohup command. This will allow you to log off the server and keep your matlab job running, but you can not reconnect to it. You will have matlab save any results that are needed as a .mat file which will be placed in the directory your matlab job is running from.

You may find that running Matlab with the nohup command can create very large output files that contain repeated lines of "Bad file descriptor" or "Error reading character from command line" messages. This can fill up the filesystem quickly.

A workaround for this problem is to run your matlab command like this:

nohup matlab -nodisplay -r MATLAB_FILE >& OUTPUT_FILE < /dev/null &

MATLAB_FILE is your matlab .m file without the .m

To kill off a program running like this you need to do the following:

ps -fu MATH_PID

You need to find the Process ID (PID) of the command you want to kill.
Then use the kill command to kill it off

kill PID