As a member of the UCalgary, you have access to their Research Computing Services. On this page, we present a brief summary of the UCalgary clusters. This documentation by no means is meant to replace the Research Computing Services documentation. The clusters are shared resources across students and researchers in the university. What you do there can affect others, so you need to be mindful of that.

There are two UCalgary compute clusters that are of interest to our group:

• The Advanced Research Computing (ARC): This cluster is used for research. It is equipped with 26 Tesla V-100 GPUs. As a student doing research at UCalgary, you are allowed to request an account on this cluster. You just need to send an email to [email protected] explaining what do you need the account for. Please make sure to copy your supervisor when requesting the account and also request access to our lab shared folder ('work/souza_lab').

• The Teaching and Learning Cluster (TALC): This cluster is used for teaching purposes. It is equipped with 15 Tesla T4 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Since we are always involved in outreach activities, such as organizing workshops, tutorials, etc., there may be situations we want to coordinate with IT regarding the use of TALC. It is good to contact them in advance when organizing such activities.

To connect to the UCalgary clusters, you need to be at the UCalgary network. If you are already at the university network, then you are good to go. If you are not, then you need to connect to the UCalgary General VPN (instructions here). You will see that there is no mystery to connecting to the UCalgary General VPN. Through the VPN, you will gain access to many papers in many journals and conferences websites. You can also use the UCalgary library website to get access to these papers, but we are digressing...

Now that you are at the UCalgary network, we will connect to the cluster.

Open a terminal window (this works for Linux and Mac computers but should be similar for Windows computers). To connect to the cluster:

foo@bar:~$ ssh <user_name>@arc.ucalgary.ca

(If connecting to the ARC cluster)

foo@bar:~$ ssh <user_name>@talc.ucalgary.ca

(If connecting to the TALC cluster)

The user name is the same as your UCalgary email address. You will be asked to type your password, which is also the same as your UCalgary password. If successful, you should get a message in the terminal saying that you are connected to the cluster. The cluster runs on a Linux system, so it is good to learn how to use the command line. This is an awesome and freely available book to help you with that: The Linux Command Line.

There are many ssh (secure shell) clients that you can use to connect to the UCalgary clusters. They often provide a graphical interface that may be easier to use, especially for users that have little command-line experience. Please check some options below. They should all be relatively easy to use.

• MobaXTerm (recommended)
• FileZilla
• WinSCP

Transferring data to and from the cluster using an ssh client graphical interface is as easy as dragging files across folders. In this sections, we will cover how to use scp (secure copy) command to move the data using the terminal. The basic command is:

foo@bar:~$ scp [options] source destination

Copying a file from your computer to the ARC cluster:

foo@bar:~$ scp <path_to_file_local> <user_name>@arc-dtn.ucalgary.ca:<path_to_copy_file_cluster>

and vice-versa:

foo@bar:~$ scp <user_name>@arc-dtn.ucalgary.ca:<path_to_file_cluster> <path_to_copy_file_local>

If you want to copy not just a single file, but an entire folder, use the option -r.

For performance and resource reasons, file transfers should be performed on the data transfer node arc-dtn.ucalgary.ca rather than on the ARC login node.