If you haven’t generated your SSH private key and public key pair,

1. Open Terminal (Mac) or Windows Subsystem for Linux (Windows)
2. Generate an RSA key pair:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

Just enter-enter-enter to accept the default options. This will generate two files under .ssh folder.

• Private key: id_rsa (this should not be shared with anyone.)
• Public key: id_rsa.pub (this is a public key, i.e., no secret)

1. Open your public key, id_rsa.pub, from ~/.ssh folder and copy all text contents. It should start with “ssh-rsa” followed by a bunch of alphanumeric characters.

Manually Adding Public SSH Key to Laguna

An alternative is to use Open Ondemand to add their public ssh key to their “home_directory/.ssh/authorized_keys” file:

1. Open OOD (https://laguna-ood.carc.usc.edu/)

1. Click the menu, Files

2. Click Home Directory

   

3. Check “Show Dotfiles” box

   

4. Click on .ssh folder
5. Click Edit for authorized_keys

1. Add public ssh key (id_rsa.pub) to end of the authorized_keys file and save

   

SSH to Laguna without Password

Now it’s time to check if you can ssh to the Laguna server without password.

1. Open your terminal (Mac) / Bash for Git or CMD (Windows)

2. Type the following ssh command:

   Example of my ssh command:

   $ ssh JehoPark@cmc.edu@laguna.carc.usc.edu

   

Checking Shell Access from OOD

1. Open Laguna OnDemand
2. Click on the meny, Cluster, and then choose >_Regional Cluster Shell Access

1. If the manual SSK key setup went well, you should see the following shell access from your browser.

   

We’ve heard that the browser shell access is not working even after manually adding the SSH public key. Please use your terminal or Git Bash.

In this session, we will be working with you to make sure you have an account on the Laguna cluster.

1. Open https://hpcaccount.usc.edu
2. Choose your school (It will bring you to your school’s SSO)
3. Check if you are assigned to the Project named “CMC_Onboarding”
4. If you have any trouble, let us know.

For additional information, check out CARC’s Getting Started guide: https://uschpc.github.io/regional-computing-website/user-guides/get-started-laguna.html

Hosted at the University of Southern California (USC) and managed by the Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC), Laguna is a state-of-the-art system boasting 2 shared login nodes, 20 compute nodes, and 8 GPU nodes. Through an extensively collaborative effort, the SoCal Regional Research Computing Alliance hopes that access to this advanced computing environment and comprehensive user services will propel local campus research forward exponentially.

National Supercomputers: ACCESS

ACCESS is a collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services that provide easy access to the most advanced computational resources and scientific research support in the world. QCL has two Campus Champions who are trained to help local users utilize national supercomputing resources available through the NSF Access program. From various national supercomputing facilities, QCL has awarded a large number of computing hours for testing and developing scientific applications (see below).

The Service Unit (SU) is like a currency used to run an application on supercomputers. Supercomputer users are charged by SUs (hours of runtime on one core). For example, if an application ran on 100 cores for 10 hours, 1,000 SUs will be deducted from your account.

The Campus Champion allocations can be used to test computational research applications. To test out the supercomputers, please make an appointment with one of the CMC Campus Champions (email: qcl@cmc.edu).

Local HPC: QCL GPU Machine

QCL has an NVIDIA DGX system having four Tesla V100 GPUs.

Local HPC: QCL Server

At the QCL, we have a Dell server machine with 2 CPUs (32 cores) and 512 GB of memory. It is currently repartitioned to serve a database server and a data storage.