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Myriad§

Myriad is designed for high I/O, high throughput jobs that will run within a single node rather than multi-node parallel jobs.

Accounts§

Myriad accounts can be applied for via the Research Computing sign up process.

As Myriad is our most general-purpose system, everyone who signs up for a Research Computing account is given access to Myriad.

Logging in§

You will use your UCL username and password to ssh in to Myriad.

ssh uccaxxx@myriad.rc.ucl.ac.uk

If using PuTTY, put myriad.rc.ucl.ac.uk as the hostname and your seven-character username (with no @ after) as the username when logging in, eg. uccaxxx. When entering your password in PuTTY no characters or bulletpoints will show on screen - this is normal.

If you are outside the UCL firewall you will need to follow the instructions for Logging in from outside the UCL firewall.

The login nodes allow you to manage your files, compile code and submit jobs. Very short (< 15 mins) and non-resource-intensive software tests can be run on the login nodes, but anything more should be submitted as a job.

Logging in to a specific node§

You can access a specific Myriad login node with: 

ssh uccaxxx@login12.myriad.rc.ucl.ac.uk
ssh uccaxxx@login13.myriad.rc.ucl.ac.uk

The main address will redirect you on to either one of them.

Copying data onto Myriad§

You will need to use an SCP or SFTP client to copy data onto Myriad. Please refer to the page on How do I transfer data onto the system?

Quotas§

The default quotas on Myriad are 150GB for home and 1TB for Scratch.

These are hard quotas: once you reach them, you will no longer be able to write more data. Keep an eye on them, as this will cause jobs to fail if they cannot create their .o or .e files at the start, or their output files partway through.

You can check both quotas on Myriad by running: 

lquota

which will give you output similar to this:

     Storage        Used        Quota   % Used   Path
        home  721.68 MiB   150.00 GiB       0%   /home/uccaxxx
     scratch   52.09 MiB     1.00 TiB       0%   /scratch/scratch/uccaxxx

You can apply for quota increases using the form at Additional Resource Requests.

Here are some tips for managing your quota and finding where space is being used.

Job sizes§

Cores Max wallclock
1 72hrs
2 to 36 48hrs

Interactive jobs run with qrsh have the same maximum wallclock time as other jobs.

Node types§

Myriad contains three main node types: standard compute nodes, high memory nodes and GPU nodes. As new nodes as added over time with slightly newer processor variants, new letters are added.

Type Cores per node RAM per node tmpfs Nodes
H,D 36 192GB 1500G 342
I,B 36 1.5TB 1500G 17
J 36 + 2 P100 GPUs 192GB 1500G 2
E,F 36 + 2 V100 GPUs 192GB 1500G 19
L 36 + 4 A100 GPUs 192GB 1500G 6

You can tell the type of a node by its name: type H nodes are named node-h00a-001 etc.

Here are the processors each node type has:

  • F, H, I, J: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz
  • B, D, E, L: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6240 CPU @ 2.60GHz

(If you ever need to check this, you can include cat /proc/cpuinfo in your jobscript so you get it in your job's .o file for the exact node your job ran on. You will get an entry for every core).

GPUs§

Myriad has four types of GPU nodes: E, F, J and L.

  • L-type nodes each have four NVIDIA 40G A100s. (Compute Capability 80)
  • F-type and E-type nodes each have two NVIDIA Tesla V100s. The CPUs are slightly different on the different letters, see above. (Compute Capability 70)
  • J-type nodes each have two NVIDIA Tesla P100s. (Compute Capability 60)

You can include nvidia-smi in your jobscript to get information about the GPU your job ran on.

Compute Capability§

Compute Capability is how NVIDIA categorises its generations of GPU architectures. When code is compiled, it targets one or multiple of these and so it may only be able to run on GPUs of a specific Compute Capability.

If you get an error like this:

CUDA runtime implicit initialization on GPU:0 failed. Status: device kernel image is invalid

then the software you are running does not support the Compute Capability of the GPU you tried to run it on, and you probably need a newer version.

Requesting multiple and specific types of GPU§

You can request a number of GPUs by adding them as a resource request to your jobscript: 

# For 1 GPU
#$ -l gpu=1

# For 2 GPUs
#$ -l gpu=2

# For 4 GPUs
#$ -l gpu=4

If you ask for one or two GPUs your job can run on any type of GPU since it can fit on any of the nodetypes. If you ask for four, it can only be a node that has four. If you need to specify one node type over the others because you need a particular Compute Capability, add a request for that type of node to your jobscript:

# request a V100 node only
#$ -ac allow=EF

# request an A100 node only
#$ -ac allow=L

The GPU nodes page has some sample code for running GPU jobs if you need a test example.

Tensorflow§

Tensorflow is installed: type module avail tensorflow to see the available versions.

Modules to load for the non-MKL GPU version: 

module load python3/3.7
module load cuda/10.0.130/gnu-4.9.2
module load cudnn/7.4.2.24/cuda-10.0
module load tensorflow/2.0.0/gpu-py37

Modules to load the most recent version we have installed with GPU support (2.11.0):

module -f unload compilers mpi gcc-libs
module load beta-modules
module load gcc-libs/10.2.0
module load python/3.9.6-gnu-10.2.0
module load cuda/11.2.0/gnu-10.2.0
module load cudnn/8.1.0.77/cuda-11.2
module load tensorflow/2.11.0/gpu

PyTorch§

PyTorch is installed: type module avail pytorch to see the versions available.

Modules to load the most recent release we have installed (May 2022) are:

module -f unload compilers mpi gcc-libs
module load beta-modules
module load gcc-libs/10.2.0
module load python3/3.9-gnu-10.2.0
module load cuda/11.3.1/gnu-10.2.0
module load cudnn/8.2.1.32/cuda-11.3
module load pytorch/1.11.0/gpu

If you want the CPU only version then use:

module -f unload compilers mpi gcc-libs
module load beta-modules
module load gcc-libs/10.2.0
module load python3/3.9-gnu-10.2.0
module load pytorch/1.11.0/cpu