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HPC OnDemand User Guide

HPC OnDemand is a web-based portal into the UNC Charlotte Research Computing Cluster. HPC OnDemand provides an integrated, single point of access to your campus HPC resources. Once authenticated in the portal, you can launch SSH sessions into the interactive/submit hosts, if you prefer to continue to work at the command line. HPC OnDemand also gives you the ability to run interactive GUI applications on a compute node, directly in a web browser tab. Start computing immediately. A simple interface makes HPC OnDemand easy to learn and use. This includes:

HPC OnDemand is based on an open-source web portal called Open OnDemand, developed by researchers at the Ohio Supercomputer Center and supported by contributors around the world. Want to learn more about the Open OnDemand Project?

Connecting to HPC OnDemand

If you haven’t gotten a Research Computing account yet, please visit our “Get Started” page for more information.

Access to the HPC OnDemand server follows the same rules as accessing our interactive/submit hosts. In order to access the HPC OnDemand server:

Once you’ve established your account and have the proper network connectivity, navigate to:

Enter your Ninernet username and password, and go through the DUO 2FA prompts. If successful, you should now be at the HPC OnDemand Dashboard:

Navigating around the HPC OnDemand Portal

As you can see from the dashboard above, you are greeted with the Message of the Day, along with several shortcuts to popular applications:

There is also a menu across the top of the Dashboard, for quick access to:

File Management

Quickly access and manage your files and directories. Under the “Files” menu, you have 2 menu shortcuts directly to your 2 personal directories: Home and Scratch. There are 2 additional menu shortcuts to the root of Projects and the root of VAST Temp. From there, you should be able to navigate to any of the Project or VAST Temp volumes that you have been granted access to. The file management interface looks like your typical web-based file manager, with options to upload or download files, create new files or directories, copy/move/delete existing files, and even open a terminal for quick and convenient command line access:

While using the HPC OnDemand Portal is quick and convenient for file management, it is best suited for smaller uploads and downloads (i.e., less than 2GB in size). For the best experience, please keep the following things in mind:

Monitoring System, Partition, and Job Statuses

HPC OnDemand gives you several ways to check the status of the cluster. Here are a few of those ways:

Job Composer

The Job Composer is helpful tool for new users to learn about batch scheduling compute jobs on an HPC cluster. You can find the Job Composer in the “Jobs” menu; it will launch in a new browser tab when chosen.

You can quickly access the growing list of example job templates we have by choosing the “Templates” menu at the top of the page. Select one of the templates you would like to submit to the cluster, then click the “Create New Job” button on the right-hand side of the page:

Whichever template you chose will now show up in your list of available jobs that you can submit to the cluster. You can scroll down and look at the contents of the submit script, and you can even edit it by clicking the “Open Editor” button at the bottom of the page (the editor will open in a new browser tab). If you made changes, make sure you save them and close the editor browser tab to return to your job list. When you’re satisfied with your job, make sure the job you want to submit is highlighted in your list of jobs, then click the green submit button:

Your job should be queued and will eventually run! If you chose one of our templates, the jobs run very fast once they get scheduled. You may have to refresh the browser tab to see the latest status of the job. Once it is marked as “Completed”, you can look at the results (scroll down and look at the right-hand column for “Folder Contents” in the “Job Details” box.

Interactive Apps

HPC OnDemand gives you the ability to run interactive GUI applications on a compute node, directly in a web browser tab. We have a handful of available applications to choose from in the “Interactive Apps” menu, including:

Once you choose one of the interactive applications from the menu, you will be able to adjust some parameters for this interactive job. For example, if you choose MATLAB, here is a screenshot of what is available to change:

Here are the options with some details and/or explanation:

Once you’re satisfied with the parameters for your interactive job, click the “Launch” button! You will be presented with the following screen. In the upper right-hand corner of the screenshot below, the status is “Running”. Prior to “Running”, the job’s status may stay “Queued” for quite some time, depending on how busy the cluster is. Once the job is allocated resources, it will briefly change from “Queued” to “Starting”, while the job is being initialized on the compute node. Then it should eventually change to “Running”, when it is ready for you to use; the “Launch MATLAB” button will also be available. You can Adjust your Compression and/or Image Quality, then click “Launch MATLAB”:

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when working within an “Interactive Application” on the HPC Cluster:

For jobs that require >1 compute node or >8 hours of time, please submit them as batch jobs to the Slurm scheduler.