As of 1:30 pm on 7/21, the Gypsum nodes and storage are operational again. Thank you for your patience.
In addition, we’d like to take this opportunity to announce a few new Unity features and remind you of our upcoming GPU workshop!
Introduction to Using GPUs on Unity
Unity facilitator Connor Kenyon of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will present a workshop on the available GPU resources on Unity. During this workshop, participants will gain experience accessing and utilizing a GPU in both interactive Jupyter sessions as well as with SLURM. Talking points will include requesting an overview of available resources, accessing GPUs on Unity, and a brief introduction to available GPU accelerated software as well as tools for profiling GPU code. This workshop will provide direct practical experience by setting up a Jupyter notebook environment for popular machine learning software such as PyTorch and tensorflow on the Unity OnDemand interface. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one on the Unity portal.
Date and Time: Friday, July 28, 2023 at 2 pm EDT Zoom Link: See the event announcement
VSCode on Unity
The popular code editor VSCode is now available directly on Unity via an Open OnDemand interactive application. As with other OOD apps, this opens on a compute node so it is appropriate to use the VS Code terminal and Jupyter Extensions to run your code. You can install extensions at the user level and manage your own settings as well. Please send us a ticket by emailing hpc@umass.edu or send a message in #help-desk in the user Slack if you run into any problems with VSCode.
Open OnDemand Module Browser
Systems administrator Simon Leary created a module browser plugin for Open OnDemand. This plugin lets you browse the modules available on Unity via a graphical interface and is similar to using the command-line “module spider” command. You can access it through the interactive application menu on Open OnDemand. However, unlike most interactive OOD apps, this module browser does not run on a compute node, so you don’t need to request resources to use it. Please send us a ticket by emailing hpc@umass.edu or send a message in #help-desk in the user Slack if you run into any problems with the module browser.
New “short” QOS
We’re pleased to announce a new Unity feature: a special “Quality of Service (QOS)” for short debug or interactive jobs.
The new QOS is limited to:
- One job per user
- Two nodes per job
- Four hours per job
A QOS is not a partition, so it can be used in combination with any partition
you have access to (cpu, gpu, cpu-preempt, gpu-preempt, etc).
Essentially,
this QOS lets you “jump the line” with a higher priority for a small, short job.
However, this does not always mean no wait, just a shorter wait, and depends on
resource availability.
You can use it by adding --qos=short to your srun or sbatch command. For
Open
OnDemand apps, this should go in the “extra slurm arguments” field at the bottom
of most of the startup forms. You also need to set the time limit to less than 4
hours and nodes to 2 or fewer or you will get an invalid QOS message.
For example:
srun -N 1 -n 8 --mem=16G --qos=short -p cpu -t 2:00:00 --pty /bin/bash
Unity User Community
If you haven’t already done so, we encourage you to join our Unity User Community Slack! To join the Unity Slack community, please sign up with your school email here. If you’re unable to register with your school email, please contact hpc@umass.edu with your preferred email address and we’ll send you a direct invite.