Overview
Once the Great Lakes cluster is ready, it will be configured and provided as a preview for early users. This date is tentatively set for July; see the Great Lakes timeline for updates and other milestones. If you are interested in becoming an early user on Great Lakes, please let us know at arcts-support@umich.edu. Some points to consider:
- Great Lakes uses the Slurm scheduler, while Flux uses Torque and Moab. You will have to rewrite your job submission scripts.
- The initial maximum walltime for jobs will be 48 hours, which we will increase later in the testing period.
- Great Lakes has different /home and /scratch directories than Flux. You will need to copy any data from Flux to Great Lakes. As a recommendation, use Globus to do these copies.
- You may experience bugs or inconsistencies during this period. We want feedback on your experience and detailed tickets if you encounter any issues.
- There may be service outages while we finalize the configuration, including Slurm configurations and settings. We will give every attempt at announcing any required outages to you.
- Not all software has been built for Great Lakes. If software you need is not available, please submit a ticket to arcts-support@umich.edu.
- The HDR InfiniBand speed is 100 Gb/s speed. As a comparison, InfiniBand speeds on Flux range from 40-100 Gb/s.
- During this preliminary phase, there will be no charge for using Great Lakes.
Who Should Consider being an Early User
There are a few reasons why you might want to consider being an Early User on Great Lakes:
- You have had performance issues previously on Flux
- You have large parallel codes that you want to verify work with the new InfiniBand network
- You have code that you want to verify works on the new Intel Skylake processors
- You want to get a jumpstart on migrating your workflows to Slurm and Great Lakes
Using the Cluster
For a step-by-step explanation on how to get started and a reference cheat sheet, see the Great Lakes User Guide. If you want a more in-depth guide to Slurm commands and features, see the Slurm User Guide.
Feedback
If you encounter an issue or have any kind of feedback (positive or negative), please email arcts-support@umich.edu detailing your situation.