Quick Start Guide

Logging into Kamiak

Username and password

Your Kamiak username and password will be your WSU network ID (NID) and its associated password. Password changes must be made through the official WSU password reset page.

Login node names

Kamiak has several login nodes which can be reached at kamiak.wsu.edu. This is a virtual internet address which sends users to the login nodes in a round-robin fashion. If you wish to connect to a particular login node you can ssh to login-p2n01.kamiak.wsu.edu or login-p2n02.kamiak.wsu.edu.

Partitions and job queues

Kamiak is a condominium cluster housing compute nodes purchased by investors and colleges. The nodes are grouped into partitions named after their lab group or college. Jobs submitted to a partition are placed into a “queue” of the same name, and will wait to run until resources requested by the job are available, in first-in first-out order. The allocation of resources and running of jobs is performed by the Slurm job scheduler.

In addition to the investor and college partitions, there is an overarching backfill partition named “kamiak” that contains all nodes, and is available for use by the entire research community. The backfill partition is designed to allow users to utilize idle compute cycles on hardware regardless of ownership.

Investors have priority access to the nodes they own. Any backfill job running on a resource which is requested by its investor owner will be preempted, i.e., canceled and automatically resubmitted to the backfill queue.

For information on the queues currently set up on Kamiak see the queue list.

Job submission

Kamiak uses the Slurm job scheduler to coordinate the use of resources on Kamiak. To run a job on Kamiak you will first need to create a Slurm job submission script describing the job’s resource requirements. Jobs are then submitted using the sbatch command. The status of your job can be monitored using the squeue command. Submitted jobs can be killed using the command scancel followed by the Job ID. For more information on job submissions see the Job Submission section of the Kamiak users guide.

Storage

Home storage

Each user on Kamiak has a home directory, accessible at /home/myWSU.netid

Lab storage

Each lab account has a folder at /data/lab/myLabName, with a default amount of storage. Additional storage can be purchased through the CIRC service center.

Scratch storage

Users who need temporary storage may take advantage of scratch space.
 
For information of default storage sizes see the Storage section in the Kamiak user guide.

Software

Modules

Kamiak uses environment modules to control the Linux software environment. Users can run the module avail command to see a list of available software modules. Software can be added to the linux environment using the command module load <package name>.

For more information see environment modules in the Kamiak users guide.