Requesting Access (old)

How to get access to the Kamiak HPC cluster

The Kamiak high-performance computing (HPC) cluster is available for use in research by all faculty, students, and staff at any of WSU’s campuses, at no cost.

User accounts. In order to use Kamiak, you first need to submit a request to create a Kamiak login account at Service Requests, Every user account is associated with a faculty sponsor.  In the submitted request, you will need to get approval from a faculty member to sponsor your account.

Logging in. Once you have access to Kamiak, you can log in from a terminal window using your WSU netid and password. This will connect you to one of the Kamiak login nodes. From here you can manage your files and submit jobs to the compute nodes.

As a courtesy to other users, please do not run applications or software installs on the login nodes, use sbatch or idev to run them on the compute nodes. Also, please note that due to security reasons, users are not allowed to have superuser privileges on the login or compute nodes.

For more information on how to submit jobs to the Kamiak HPC cluster, please see the Training Slides, the Training Video, the Cheat Sheet, the Quick Start Guide, or the more extensive User’s Guide.

Storage. Each user is provided a home folder of 100GB at no cost, and given access to the shared “kamiak” partition that includes all nodes. Each faculty sponsor in addition is provided a lab folder of 500GB at no cost. Users may also take advantage of temporary scratch storage with a 10TB per user limit and two week lifetime of each scratch folder. Additional lab storage can be rented on an annual basis through the CIRC service desk. Compute nodes are also available for purchase, on which the investors are given prioritized access.

Getting help. For any questions or issues regarding Kamiak, please submit a service request at Service Requests. In addition, CIRC hosts an interactive help desk on Tuesdays and Thursdays via Zoom video conferencing. Appointments can be made in advance at Help Desk Appointments.