The eScience Cluster - how to access

• You will access the master node, escience1.bham.ac.uk, and submit work to the cluster via that system.
  
• You will use the userid (in lower case) and password you had to supply when registering (see How to Register).
  
• From a Windows desktop PC, you may need the putty ssh package, or something similar, to support interactive sessions from your desktop to the master node, and the winscp package, to copy files between your desktop and the cluster.
• From a Windows desktop PC, you can get a very useable point-and-click interface by just using the winscp package above, and not using putty at all. You can use the Explorer interface of winscp, which gives an Explorer view of just the files on the remote escience1 system. You can define a Custom Command of Submit Job which invokes the qsub command on the selected file to submit a job, and you can view and edit the output as well as the submitted script all from the same winscp window. You can drag-and-drop files to or from your local PC if you want to produce or analyse them locally.
  
• If from a Windows desktop you want more than a plain-text interface to the escience1 machine, you will need to have Exceed, suitably configured, or Cygwin, installed on your PC, and make use of the X-tunnelling facility of putty/ssh. But for many purposes, a plain-text interface is fine.
  
• From a Unix/Linux desktop PC, you will already have the openssh package, with the commands ssh, scp and sftp, for the interactive sessions and file copying respectively, and you will be able to open X windows if the -X option is specified or defaulted on the ssh command.
• From any system, you can use the web job status pages at http://escience1.bham.ac.uk/status/ to check the progress of your jobs (and others), as an alternative to using  interactive commands on escience1.
  
• Please note that the escience1 master node will only accept SSH protocol 2. This is negotiated without problems by all ssh clients that I know of. If you get any problems, let us know.
  
• Typically, if you choose to use an interactive session on escience1, you might copy files from your desktop to the master node before your interactive session; then start an interactive session to start-off some jobs and later look to see if they have been completed; and then copy output files from the master node to your desktop for keeping or printing. All these actions are initiated from your desktop.
  
• Jobs which you submit are normally run as a background activity, starting immediately or later depending on how busy the cluster is, leaving you free to prepare other work.
• Submitting jobs uses the Torque system. Follow that link for the details.

L.S.Lowe