HPC User Guide — Start Here

Eligibility, login methods, hardware overview and first commands for the CSE HPC cluster.

SSH to the compute nodes

SSH access to all compute nodes is currently enabled but will be disabled in the future. The HPC relies on the job scheduler to manage a large number of running jobs, maintain fair-share usage, and improve resource utilisation for the school. Please do not SSH into the compute nodes (including using VS Code) unless a special arrangement has been made. For interactive workloads using x11 VNC or VS Code, see Interactive Job.

For all HPC and research-computing support, please contact ss@cse.unsw.edu.au.

Overview

Preview: The following table shows the upcoming Debian 13 HPC naming convention. The new system will use gxXX node names. For how to use it (alpha), see Running Jobs on the New Slurm HPC (Alpha).

Node Range	GPU	vRAM	Architecture	Hostname
00's	Triple L4s	24 GB	Ada Lovelace	`gx{01..08}`
10's	Dual L40s	48 GB	Ada Lovelace	`gx{10..13}`
20's	Dual H100s	80 GB	Hopper	`gx{20..22}`
30's	Dual RTX Pro 6000s	96 GB	Blackwell	`gx{30..32}`
40's	Quad RTX Pro 6000s (TBC)	96 GB	Blackwell	`gx{40..41}`

Current System (GridEngine-based):

[b] suffix indicates hardware variants under the same processor architecture — for example, larger scratch space or more powerful GPGPU models.

Compute Node	Hardware Summary	Memory	GPGPU Summary
`wp-zeta-xxxx[b]`	Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon based servers (Dell R760XA)	1024 GB (1 TB)	NVIDIA H100NVL
`wp-omega-xxxx[b]`	AMD Zen 4 based EPYC servers (Dell R6625, R7625 etc)	1024 GB (1 TB)	NVIDIA L4, L40S

Access to HPC

Eligibility

Anyone authorised to access CSE's public login servers has access to this service. Please ensure you can log in to login.cse.unsw.edu.au first. Make sure your home directory is set up properly; if not, please contact ss@cse.unsw.edu.au.

To SSH into the login nodes:

ssh zID@glab.cse.unsw.edu.au

It is recommended to access the service securely via CSE VPN. See CSE OpenVPN Service for setting up OpenVPN on your computer. Once VPN is connected successfully, run:

ssh zID@glab.cse.unsw.edu.au

As an alternative, you can use login.cse.unsw.edu.au as a jumpbox.

# Login to the CSE login service first
ssh zID@login.cse.unsw.edu.au
# then connect to the HPC
ssh zID@glab.cse.unsw.edu.au

Technical support

For all technical support requests or inquiries, please email ss@cse.unsw.edu.au. If the issue is related to a job failure, always include the JOB_ID and the job output file (either attach the file or provide the file path).

Acknowledging use of the research computing facilities

We would appreciate it if the following text, or a similar acknowledgement, is included in your publications:

General acknowledgement: "Computational facilities were provided by the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney."

If a more specific resource name is needed: "This research includes computations using the computational cluster, supported by the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney."

Additionally, if you have used NCI facilities, please ensure they are acknowledged in your publications as well.

What's next?

First few things a new user may want to do is to look around, such as:

Check the HPC overall status

The -u "*" will display information from ALL users so to give better coverage.

# Check the overall HPC queues status
$ qstat -f -u "*"
queuename                      qtype resv/used/tot. load_avg arch          states
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all.q@wp-delta-f01.cse.unsw.ed BIP   0/0/56         0.01     lx-amd64
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all.q@wp-delta-f02.cse.unsw.ed BIP   0/0/56         0.04     lx-amd64
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all.q@wp-delta-f03.cse.unsw.ed BIP   0/0/56         0.00     lx-amd64
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all.q@wp-omega-c01.cse.unsw.ed BIP   0/0/96         0.00     lx-amd64
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all.q@wp-omega-c02.cse.unsw.ed BIP   0/0/96         0.01     lx-amd64
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all.q@wp-omega-c03.cse.unsw.ed BIP   0/0/96         0.03     lx-amd64
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all.q@wp-omega-c04.cse.unsw.ed BIP   0/0/96         0.01     lx-amd64

Check RQS (Resource Quota Set)

See sge_resource_quota.

# Check the currently configured RQS
$ qconf -srqs
{
   name         RQS_CPU_MEM
   description  "Individual user and group project quotas for CPU, Memory"
   enabled      TRUE
   limit        ***output omitted***
}

# Check current quota usage
$ qquota -u "*"
resource quota rule limit                filter
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RQS_CPU_MEM/1      slots=6/56           projects CSG
RQS_CPU_MEM/1      mem=106.000G/256.000 projects CSG
RQS_CPU_MEM/4      slots=1/8            users z3155686
RQS_CPU_MEM/4      mem=1.000G/32.000G   users z3155686

HPC User Guide — Start Here

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