Available resources and software
Available resources
| Cores | RAM | GPU | USE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| quebracho | 64 | 1TB | Yes | Only land-use projects (please check before using) |
| sequoia | 192 | 1.5TB | No | All other emLab research |
| Knot | 1,500 | 48 GB - 1TB | Yes | UCSB shared resource |
| Pod | ~2,600 | 190 GB - 1.5 TB | Yes | UCSB shared resource |
| Braid2 | ~2,200 | 192 - 368 GB | Yes | UCSB condo cluster (PI must buy node) |
The emLab SOP will focus on using quebracho and sequoia. For further information on using other UCSB campus resources, you can refer to our specific guide on that. However please note that this guide is several years out-of-date, and you may find better and more current information directly on a UCSB website. Additionally, now that we have our own HPC servers, we no longer recommend using Google Compute Engine, which is a pay-as-you-go cloud computing server. It can be quite expensive, and has setup challenges as compared to our own servers. However, if you need to use GCE for whatever reason, emLab alumni Grant McDermott wrote a very helpful tutorial on using R Studio Server on GCE.
Available software
Both quebracho and sequoia currently have R Studio Server, Positron Server, Jupyter Notebook, and VSCode installed. GRIT manages these installations for us. They will also manage updates for these.
Both quebracho and sequoia also leverage SLURM queueing systems. All computational activity is forced to go through SLURM, even interactive R Studio and Jupyter Notebook sessions (see section on Open OnDemand below). Scrontab can be used to manage SLURM crontab files.
If we wish to install additional software, we will need to decide on these as a group and have GRIT install them for us. When considering new software to install, we should consider whether or not it is already available on other campus servers; what it will cost; and how many people in emLab would use it. Generally speaking, if a specific piece of software is expensive (e.g., Stata or Matlab), will not be used by too many emLab folks, and is already available on other campus servers, we should rely on these other campus servers and not install it on our own servers. Users interested in MatLab should first try Pod which has the necessary licenses and is available for free.
If users wish to use python it is recommended that they install Visual Studio Code (VS Code) available for free from Microsoft. With VS Code installed, users can add the Remote SSH extension and access sequoia via SSH tunnel. Further instructions can be found in the VS Code Documentation. After accessing sequoia via SSH tunnel, users may install their preferred python distribution. Miniconda is a good starting point, though other options are available. This Medium article is a good place for further installation guidance. Finally, it is recommended to create custom python environments for each project. All ssh sessions go into the slurm queue.
For users that need Stata, it is already available on both UCSB’s Knot cluster. More details for using Stata on Knot can be found here. We will not be installing Stata on quebracho or sequoia.
For users of Matlab, it is already available on all campus clusters. More details can be found here. We will not be installing Matlab on quebracho or sequoia.