New User Training: Glossary

Blue Waters enables Petascale Science not possible anywhere else

Key emphasis is on sustained petascale computing

Blue Waters general address is bw.ncsa.illinois.edu

Blue Waters uses two-factor authentication

~/.ssh/config stores important connection information

-X flag enables X11 forwarding over ssh

Blue Waters has 3 online filesystems and one tape storage system

projects command lists user’s science projects on Blue Waters

quota command lists user’s usage on all 4 filesystems

Blue Waters supports ACL for for fine-grained access control to files

setfacl and getfacl

Use scp, rsync, wget, git for “small” data transfers

Use “Globus Online” (GO) for large/long data transfers

Blue Waters’ and Nearline addresses in GO are ncsa#BlueWaters and ncsa#Nearline, correspondingly

Use Globus to store data in Nearline

Software on Blue Waters lives in “modules”

“Install” and “uninstall” software with module load / module unload

There are 4 types of Programming Environments on Blue Waters: Cray, Gnu, Intel, and PGI

Python and its derivatives (Tensorflow, PyTorch) live in “bwpy” module and its sister modules.

Job scripts are regular scripts with special #PBS comments

#PBS comments must appear at the top of the job script

#PBS comments specify all requests and set characteristics of compute jobs

Job scripts are executed on MOM nodes.

Interactive jobs are the jobs submitted with -I flag and do not accept job script as input

aprun must be used to send applications for execution to compute nodes.