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.

 Yes, but we would advise to request a dedicated account for this purpose. After installing the software in the home directory of this account you can use the member program to give other accounts the possibility to access and use this software.

 For this purpose you can request a further account. However, this account will not have a login possibility. You can use the member program to add other users to the associated group similar to the described usage of project accounts.

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

Each user who has an account for the RWTH High Performance Computing is automatically subscribed to the rzcluster mailing list about which announcements about the cluster are distributed. First of all, we would like to discourage you from leaving the list since you may miss important information. If you nevertheless want to unsubscribe, please use the following command:

Note that the command may ask for a password for authentication.

 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.

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 Using the Slurm Batch System for details.