Documentation
Quick Start Guide
This provides some basic guidelines on getting started with Kay. If you are a new user to the Kay National HPC System (or to HPC systems in general), you should read this documentation first.
Setting up an Account and Access
To become a user on Kay, you must:
- Register an account in here
Then you will need to do one of the following:
- Apply for your own National Service project
- Join an existing project
- Gain access through your Institution condominium
Please refer to the Access to HPC section for more details.
All use of Kay is subject to the ICHEC Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP).
Connecting to Kay
SSH Keys
- All users must initially configure an SSH key on each device they use to connect to Kay. Please note that the latter requires that you generate SSH public-private key pair on each local workstation (and not on Kay) for security reasons (e.g. ssh-keygen for Linux/Mac, MobaXterm for Windows; DO NOT store your private key on Kay). Check out our tutorial - Setting up SSH Keys - for more details. As a new user, you will need to send us your public key before you can connect to Kay.
- You will need to login using your central ICHEC account username. You will be requested to authenticate using both your central ICHEC account password and SSH key-based authentication.
Logging in
You can connect to Kay using a SSH client:
- Unix-like systems (e.g. Linux, macOS): SSH clients are usually pre-installed. You can access these through the Terminal (or any other command line interface).
ssh {{userName}}@kay.ichec.ie
Note: In the code examples like this, curly braces (and text inside it) are placeholders and should be replaced with the relevant text by you. For example, if your user name is jsmith, then replace {{userName}} in the code examples with jsmith
- Windows: You need to install a SSH client. We recommend MobaXterm.
File Storage
We provide two locations for storing files on Kay
Home: /ichec/home/users/{{userName}} Work: /ichec/work/{{projectName}}
They differ in few ways
Name | Home | Work |
---|---|---|
Purpose | Store personal file or source code | Store simulation data |
Quota | Smaller Limit: 25GB | Larger Limit (see Class Projects Limits) |
Access | Only to you | To all users in the project |
Backup | Yes, backed up to tape | No |
Note: Data is backed up to protect against system failure. We cannot recover data if you accidentally delete it.
Data Transfer
On Unix-like systems, you can use command line applications such as SCP or SFTP.
Using SCP
scp {{localFilePath}} {{userName}}@kay.ichec.ie:{{remoteFilePath}}
Using SFTP
sftp {{userName}}@kay.ichec.ie put {{localFilePath}}
On Windows, you can use graphical applications such as WinSCP.
Software Packages
We use environment modules (or commonly known as modules) to organise all the software packages we provide on Kay including scientific applications, compilers and development libraries. To start using the package of interest, you should load the corresponding module. You can list all the available modules on the system by:
module avail
To load the module:
module load intel/2019
To check the loaded modules in your environment:
module list
Job Submission
We use a batch system (SLURM) to allocate resources on Kay to users. For compute-intensive workloads, you should always use the compute nodes by submitting a batch job to SLURM. Please refer to Slurm Workload Manager, PBS to Slurm, and Slurm Commands pages for more detailed documentation.
To submit a job, create a submission script:
mybatchjob.sh
using emacs, nano or vim with the following text as an example (for a MPI application):
#!/bin/sh #SBATCH --time=00:20:00 #SBATCH --nodes=2 #SBATCH -A {{myProjectID}} #SBATCH -p DevQ module load intel/2019 mpirun -n 80 mpi-benchmarks/src/IMB-MPI1
Submit the job using:
sbatch mybatchjob.sh
You can check the progress of any jobs you have submitted by using:
squeue -u {{userName}}
Need help?
If you get stuck, you can check our:
- Kay User Guide
- FAQs
- Tutorials
- Software Guides
- Or alternatively, contact our Helpdesk.