Overview
The Nova cluster is the primary high performance computing solution for research and education at ISU. It is available to users from every academic discipline at the University.
Contents
Equipment
The cluster currently consists of:
- 330+ compute nodes with over 38,000 CPU cores
- 200+ GPUs
- 200 TB of memory
- 2PB of high speed data storage
- High-speed networking
New components are added on a regular basis to ensure access to the latest technology. For in-depth hardware details, see the Nova Hardware page.
Getting Access to Nova
There are three access tiers on the cluster – sponsored, community, and instructional.
- The Sponsored tier consists of research groups that have purchased hardware for the cluster. The purchased hardware is added to the pool of resources available to all researchers. Buying hardware is optional, but users with sponsored access will have higher job priority and more generous resource limits than community users. Research groups can purchase compute nodes or storage using the Nova Cluster Node and Storage Purchase Form.
- The Community tier users are researchers that have not purchased hardware for the cluster. While community users have lower priority access to compute nodes and less data storage than sponsored users, they are able to use any of the compute nodes, which gives them sufficient resources for testing and proof-of-concept work.
Community users can request access to the cluster using the HPC Cluster Access Request form.
- The Instructional tier users is students and instructors associated with a class that is using the cluster for teaching. Instructional users get access to the instruction queue hardware that is reserved for instructional use.
Instructors can request access for their class using the HPC Cluster Access Request form.
HPC Class
HPC Class is a partition on the Nova cluster set aside for classroom and instructional users. See this page for more information.
Logging In
Once your access request has been approved, you can log in to the cluster. There are a few common ways to log in:
Nova OnDemand
The easiest way to access Nova is with Nova OnDemand. Just point your browser to https://nova-ondemand.its.iastate.edu (you must be on-campus or connected to the VPN). From the main menu, if you select Clusters->_Nova Shell, you will be given a shell window on the head node. Alternatively, you can select Interactive Apps -> Nova Desktop which will allow you to launch a full graphical desktop session on a compute node.
SSH
You can use an SSH client to connect to the Nova head node, nova.its.iastate.edu, using your ISU NetID. The first time you try to connect to the head node over SSH, the system will check if you have second factor authentication enabled for HPC. If not, the system will send you an e-mail with the instructions for setting it up.
Slurm Job Scheduler
To use the cluster, a user generally submits job requests to the Slurm workload manager which puts the job requests into a job queue and runs each job when the necessary hardware becomes available. Whether the job is run as a batch job or interactively, Slurm controls what hardware is assigned to it.
Batch jobs are submitted to Slurm as a batch script containing the shell commands a user wants to run along with the desired hardware resources and other job parameters. Users can use the Slurm Script Generator to create batch job scripts.
Users can also request interactive sessions when they want to run ad hoc commands in a Linux shell on a compute node. This is very useful for testing and development of an application.
Another very popular way to get interactive sessions is with Nova OnDemand which can provide access to a simple command line session, or a full graphical Linux desktop, all using your web browser.
Software
The cluster runs on Linux. There are thousands of research software packages available, including both open source and proprietary commercial applications. Research IT staff are available to help build and integrate packages as needed. Users can access any of the packages in the software repository using the environment module commands.
File Storage
There are several options for storing files on Nova. See the HPC File Storage Guide for more details.