Migrating from mox to klone
If you were previously a proficient mox user and now find yourself on klone, what's new / different? This is a high-level summary, please consult the documentation link for more details.
Updated August 10, 2021 to include additional information specific for GPU users.
Login
- Logging in was previously to mox.hyak.uw.edunow it'sklone.hyak.uw.edu.
- As a reminder login nodes are only to connect to the cluster, navigate the cluster file system, and submit jobs. This applies to both kloneandmox. Do not compile codes on the login node or run any programs that require significant compute (get a session with Slurm).
Data Transfer
- Only use the login node to transfer data on klone. Onmoxyou'd have used a build node or could have used the login node if it wasn't very computationally heavy.
Storage
- The path to lab storage is still /gscratch/mylabon bothkloneandmox. You'll need to copy over the data frommoxtokloneyou want to continue using.
- Home directories are still 10GB per user, same on both clusters.
- Scrubbed exists on klonejust as it did onmoxat/gscratch/scrubbedthis is a free-for-all space on both clusters where files are automatically deleted after 21 days.
- Some new benefits of the klonestorage compared tomox:- There are snapshots for gscratch! Look inside theThis is currently disabled./gscratch/mylab/.snapshotsfolder for a copy of your lab folder once an hour, every hour, for 24 hours. This is not a backup copy nor a replacement for version management (e.g.,git) but useful for retrieving recent versions or something accidentally deleted.
- More storage! Previously you received 500GB or 0.5TB of gscratch quota per node (or pair of GPUs) contributed to mox. Now onklonewe've doubled your associated storage quota! For example, 2 nodes onmoxwould mean 1TB of gscratch but 2 nodes onklonenow means 2TB of gscratch. If you had an 8 x GPU node onmoxyou would have received 2TB of gscratch but an 8 x GPU node onklonenow means 4TB of gscratch.
- It's faster! We've had reports of performance that's averaging a 30% speed up all else being equal, nothing you need to do aside from use kloneinstead ofmox.
- It's faster than fast! While klonestorage is faster thanmoxstorage overall, gscratch onkloneis further turbo charged with a NVMe flash based tier. NVMe flash is among the fastest storage mediums you can get and further differentiating benefit if you use gscratch vs scrubbed onklone.
 
- There are snapshots for gscratch! 
Compute
- When submitting a Slurm job, whether interactive (i.e., salloc) or batch (i.e.,sbatch) you'll want to first decide which account to use. This is the group you're part of. You can run the commandgroupsto see your affiliated accounts and runhyakallocto see all the resources (e.g., compute cores, memory, GPUs) used and available associated with each affiliated account.
- Then decide if you want to run this job to count under your resource allocation by submitting to the compute partition (i.e., -p compute) or if you want this job to use idle resources from other groups across the cluster using the checkpoint partition (i.e.,-p ckpt).
- Non-standard partitions. Run sinfoto see the list of all possible partitions, this is only if your group contributed non-standard nodes (e.g., high memory, GPUs) and need to idenitify the appropriate partition names to get immediate use. Otherwise, you'd only be able to get them in a checkpoint capacity. For GPU users this is currently either thegpu-2080tior thegpu-rtx6kpartitions for 11GB and 24GB of GPU memory cards, respectively.
- There is no build node on klone. Get an interactive session (e.g.,salloc) under an existing account and partition combination you have access to.
- All nodes have internet now on klone. Do all data transfers to and fromkloneon theklonelogin nodes, the login nodes onklonehave dual 40 Gbps uplinks to the internet. While the compute nodes onklonehave internet routing now, they are bottlenecked at 1 Gbps so not suitable for big data transfers.
Software
- Singularity containers work the same on both clusters, we encourage this when possible. Refer to our container documentation link.
- Modules is updated to the latest versions of the most core parts that the Hyak team maintains (e.g., gcc, Intel, Matlab). Refresh yourself about modules link.
- If neither Singularity nor existing modules works for you, you may have to re-compile your codes on klone. "contrib" modules works different now onklonevsmox, please check out the details link.