FAQ - RWTH High Performance Computing (Linux)

No, since maintaining proper profiles for more than one shell incurs substantial administrative overhead, which we cannot afford. If you would like to use a different shell for interactive work, please refer to this page.

 Yes, but since secondary accounts are for legal reasons configured to not allow a login you can basically only use them to share data with other users.

While it is possible to add other people to your own group using the member command, we highly discourage this. The other person will gain access to all of your files, unless you change the files group permissions.

Instead we recommend that you request a dedicated non-computing group with storage on the filesystem.

The best way to do this is with project or non-computing group spaces.

 You can use scp or a corresponding Windows client as described here

 There is a limit of 10.000 slots for pending jobs per user. You will have to wait until one of your jobs gains status "RUN", which will free up slots for new pending jobs.

 Please contact our IT-ServiceDesk with the request to permit this account to use the software. If the license conditions doesn't deny the usage for this person we will activate the access.

 If you have created the batch script on a Windows system, please check with the command cat -A <script name> whether it has Windows line endings. Those appear as ^M.

This error usually occurs due to one (or more) of the following reasons:

Missing execute (and read) permissions

• Check the permissions with: ls -l /path/to/script
• The output shows a permission string (e.g., -rwxr-xr--).
• If x (execute) is missing, add it with: chmod +x /path/to/script
• Note: Read permissions are also required, but these are usually already set by default

Incorrect ownership

• If the script is owned by another user or group that you are not part of, you may not have permission to run it
• Check ownership with: ls -l /path/to/script
• If access is needed, contact the owner of the file or manager of the group

Inaccessible directories in the path

• Each directory in the path to the script must be accessible for your user
• Check permissions for each directory in the path with: ls -ld /path /path/to /path/to/script
• You need at leaste execute (x) permission on each directory to access files inside.

In order to use a certain software package XYZ you have to make it available with the command

module load NAME/VERSION

Please see the page of the module system for more details.

You can use the command sacct -u <username> -S 2023-01-01 to display information about finished Slurm jobs since 2023-01-01. Change the date according to your own needs.

 You can find a list of some of the installed software packages on the page Installed Software. The list is non-exhaustive. Please refer to the module system on how to find more modules.

It is not possible to use Docker on the cluster. Instead, Apptainer is available as a container solution. Apptainer is able to convert Docker images into Apptainer images.

You can find more information about Apptainer here: Usage of Apptainer

 Your work directory does not become visible until you cd into it or get access to it otherwise.

 With squeue --start Slurm will report the expected start time.

Please refer to Slurm Job Management for details.

If you are unable to start a FastX session and encounter the error message "Failed to start the session", this may be due to insufficient available space in your $HOME directory.
To resolve this issue, please connect to the cluster via SSH and check your home directory quota by using the r_quota command.
If your quota is fully utilized, kindly remove any unnecessary files to free up space.

For more information on the process see Resources for Linux on HPC.