Instructions to complete prior to August 6th.

Setup Instructions

Instructions here are divided into required and optional steps. We expect everyone to, minimally, complete all required steps here. The optional steps are likely to improve your experience by simplifying or improving performance of certain operations.

Required Steps

Please complete the following required steps prior to the beginning of the session on Monday, August 6th.

  1. Log Into Cooley
    • Use secure shell with compression, and trusted X forwarding enabled
      ssh -l <username> -C -Y cooley.alcf.anl.gov
      
  2. Copy Installed Software
    • Once you are logged into Cooley, please execute the following instruction to create a local, editable copy of numerical package software.
      cd ~
      rsync -a /projects/ATPESC2018/FASTMath/HandsOnLessons .
      
      • Note 1: do not include a trailing slash, / in the path argument.
      • Note 2: You may be asked periodically throughout the day to re-execute this command to update your local copy if we discover changes are necessary.
  3. Confirm you can compile and run an example
    • As a test case, use an example from hypre to confirm you can compile and run an example
      qsub -I -n 1 -t 5 -A ATPESC2018 -q debug
      cd HandsOnLessons/krylov_amg
      touch ij.c
      make ij
      mpiexec -n 4 ./ij
      echo $?
      exit
      
    • The qsub command reserves a cooley node for interactive work for 5 minutes. You may have to wait a moment for the interactive prompt on the reserved node to return.
    • The above commands should produce makefile and execution output. In particular the last echo command should produce a 0 response.
  4. As soon after 9am, Monday, August 6th as possible, allocate an interactive node on cooley. The following command allocates a single Cooley node (-n 1) for 480 minutes (-t 480) using the ATPESC2018 allocation (-A ATPESC2018) and the training reservation (-q training):
    qsub -I -n 1 -t 480 -A ATPESC2018 -q training
    

    The command blocks until the node is ready. Until the allocation expires (480mins in this example), all commands executed in the returned session will run on the allocated compute node; mpiexec can be used directly instead of going through qsub.

    • Note 1: The special -q training will not be functional until 9am, August 6th and will go away 9pm that same day.
    • Note 2: Please DO NOT run MPI jobs on the login nodes. Instead, run them on an allocated compute node.
    • Note 3: Be aware, however, that any running job will be terminated when your allocation expires.
    • Note 4: To enable X windows for visualization on the compute node, you can open a new terminal and login to the allocated compute node by doing ssh -Y cc0xx (cc0xx is your node id)

Visualization Tool Setup

Local Installations

Results from various applications we use today may involve visualization with VisIt, ParaView or GLVis. By far, the simplest and most reliable way to setup any of these tools is to create a local installation on your laptop and then transfer data files from cooley to visualize them locally. For instructions for installing these tools locally…

  • For VisIt, go here to find a suitable bundled executable installation for your system and then download and install it.
  • For ParaView, go here to find a suitable bundled executable installation for your system and then download and install it.
  • For GLVis, go here and follow instructions for building GLVis from sources. Note, this will also involve building MFEM but does NOT require any special MFEM dependencies. Alternatively, you may use Spack to install GLVis and MFEM as like so
    git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git
    . spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh
    spack install mfem glvis
    

Once you have installed these tools, you can move data from cooley to your local machine and visualize it locally. But, manually logging in to move data files each time you need to can become combersome. You can use a single scp command to copy many files using either file globbing or the -r recursive command-line option to copy whole directory trees as for example…

scp "cooley:/tmp/imag00*.png" .

or

scp -r cooley:/foo/bar/tree .

Beyond that, you may also want to have a look at…

to simplify the process of manually moving data over many iterations of examples and tests.

Using Local Installations in Client-Server Mode

A benefit from installing these tools locally is that once you have them installed locally, you can also configure them to run client-server where you run an instance locally but use that instance to log into a remote resource, such as cooley, and visualize data there without having to manually transfer it locally. To setup these tools for client-server operation…

Using Remote Visualization Tools Through VNC

If you don’t want to bother with installing anything locally or if you run into problems with that and/or if you don’t want to constantly move data between cooley and your local system or setup passwordless ssh for that, a final option is to use VNC. Setting up a VNC connection involves a complex set of steps including SSH tunneling and port forwarding. It is described in some detail here. However, we have created a shell script for you to run to simplify this process.

But, a few challenges in using VNC on cooley are…

  • It is likely to be useful to you only if you are on OSX or Linux or have Cygwin on Windows.
  • You must have some vnc client installed on your local system
    • It is built into OSX
    • On linux, you will need either vncviewer or vinagre
  • Only the twm window manager is available
  • Windows can be sized way too large for the VNC wrapper window in which they are placed
  • Cutting and pasting between VNC windows and other windows may not work as expected.

With all those warnings and caveats aside, in addition, the setup script we provide does take the following actions to your login setup on cooley…

  • It adds some lines to your ~/.ssh/config file (for SSH control master)
  • It changes your ~/.vnc/xstartup If you do not wont these files changed…please do not run this script.

Here are the steps

  1. Copy the vnc setup script to a suitable directory on your local machine
    scp -l <cooley-username> cooley:/projects/ATPESC2018/FASTMath/scripts/atpesc2018_cooley_vnc_setup.sh .
    chmod 755 ./atpesc2018_cooley_vnc_setup.sh
    
  2. Run the script
    ./atpesc2018_cooley_vnc_setup.sh <cooley-username>
    
  3. It will prompt you for your cooley login password. Enter it as you normally would.
  4. You may observer output such as…
    Password: 
    Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
    Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
    
  5. It will then ask you for a temporary VNC password. Use 8 chars, upper and lower case and at least one digit. Please do not use the password used here in this example.
    Create temporary VNC Password: Hello246
    
  6. It will ask you to confirm your password
    You have entered "Hello246", is this correct?
    1) Yes
    2) No
    
  7. Enter 1 for Yes or 2 for no and a chance to re-entry a password.
  8. It will then attempt to allocate (e.g. reserve a node on cooley). While the node reservation request is processing, it will periodically print a messaging indicating it is still waiting for the allocation…
    Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
    Checking for allocation completion
    process_mux_new_session: tcgetattr: Operation not supported by device
    Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
    Checking for allocation completion
    Checking for allocation completion
    Checking for allocation completion
    Checking for allocation completion
    Checking for allocation completion
    Got allocation at cc006
    
  9. Note, it can take a few minutes before an allocation is created. When the allocation is ready, it prints the node id. Above, that is cc006.
  10. It then sets up a tunneling VNC connection to that node on port 22590.
    Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
    [1] 2479360
    Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
    Attempting to connect VNC to localhost:22590 - If this fails you can reattempt this manually
    
  11. If all goes well, you will be prompted to enter your vnc password to connect to the vnc instance just created. Enter the password you created above (e.g. Hello246 in this example). Then, you should see a VNC window appear like so with an xterm running in it on the allocated node. VNC Window ::
  12. From here, you can
    soft add +visit
    soft add +paraview
    

    to add VisIt and ParaView to your environment.

  13. Finally, remember that part of the process of using VNC is to acquire a reserved allocation on cooley. So, you should not then also reserve any other cooley nodes apart from the one reserved with VNC through this script.