Introduction to Research Computing on Palmetto Cluster: Glossary

Palmetto is a very powerful high-performance computing cluster

Palmetto can be accessed by an SSh (secure shell) client

Windows user can use MobaXTerm application

Mac users can use the Terminal application

Palmetto contains more than 2000 interconnected compute nodes

a phase is a group of compute nodes that have the same architecture (CPUs, RAM, GPUs)

a specialized login node runs the SSH server

users get 100 Gb of backed-up storage in their home directories

they also have access to more than 2 Pb of scratch storage

scratch storage is not backed up, and files left unused for 1 month are deleted

whatsfree shows the current Palmetto usage

qsub sends a request for a compute node to the scheduler

software available on Palmetto is organized into modules according to version

modules need to be loaded before use

batch jobs don’t require interaction with the user and run on the compute nodes on the background

to submit a batch job, users need to provide a PBS script which is passed to the scheduler

jobs are assigned to queues, according to the amount of requested resources

different queues have different limits on the walltime and the number of parallel jobs