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> User Quick Start Guide

This guide will provide you with the basic information needed to get up and running on the FASRC cluster with your FARC account. If you’d like more detailed information, each section has a link to more full documentation

LOGIN USERNAME CHEATSHEET (click to expand)

PREREQUISITES

Steps to obtaining and setting up a FASRC account.

1 . Account

1. Get a FASRC account using the account request tool.

Before you can access the cluster you need to request a Research Computing account.

See How Do I Get a Research Computing Account for instructions if you do not yet have an account.

Once you have your FASRC account, move to the Step 2 tab.

2 . Password

3. OpenAuth

4 . FASRC VPN

5 . Training

 

Accessing the Cluster and Cluster Resources

Terminal access

Terminal access via SSH to login.rc.fas.harvard.edu

 If you did not request cluster access when signing up, you will not be able to log into the cluster or login nodes as you have no home directory. You will simply be asked for your password over and over. See this doc for how to add cluster access as well as additional groups.

For command line access to the cluster, you will SSH to login.rc.fas.harvard.edu using your FASRC username, password and OpenAuth token.

See also our SSH/Command Line access documentation for more-detailed instructions: Command line access using a terminal

Watch “Getting Started on FASRC Cluster with CLI (Command Line Interface)”
[slides]

OpenOnDemand (OOD)


Storage and Data Management

Research Data Management

There are many policies and procedures related to managing data at Harvard. See our Research Data Management (RDM) page for tools, resources, and guidance to help researchers manage their data effectively and prepare it for sharing, and reuse.

Watch “Research Data Management at FASRC”
[slides]

 

Transferring Data

Determine where files will be stored


Running Jobs and Loading Software

For detailed information on running jobs on the FASRC cluster(s), partitions, workflows, and other job details, please see our Running Jobs page.

Information on using software on the cluster can be found on our Software Overview page.


Familiarize yourself with proper decorum on the cluster

The FASRC cluster is a massive system of shared resources. While much effort is made to ensure that you can do your work in relative isolation, some rules must be followed to avoid interfering with other user’s work.

The most important rule on the cluster is to avoid performing computations on the login nodes. Once you’ve logged in, you must either submit a batch processing script or start an interactive session (see Running Jobs). Any significant processing (high memory requirements, long running time, etc.) that is attempted on the login nodes will be killed.

See the full list of Cluster Customs and Responsibilities.


Getting further help

If you have any trouble with running jobs on the cluster, first check the comprehensive Running Jobs page and/or search our documentation. If your questions are not answered there or in any of our other many documentation pages, feel free to submit a help ticket to FASRC. Please include any job ID of the job in question. Also provide us with your  username, what script you ran, the error and output files, and where they’re located as well. The output of module list is often helpful, too.
If you need more hands-on help, FASRC holds weekly Office Hours on Wednesdays from 12pm – 3pm.

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