Once you are connected to Aloe via SSH connections, you can use this terminal to request compute resources.

Connecting to the terminal of a login node is the first step. A login node is ideal for a number of tasks, generally which require little to no continuous compute capability. Navigating your file structure, editing files, simple copy & move operations, and similar activities can be done here.

When it comes to computational analysis or large data transfers, you will rely on compute nodes (and/or Globus file transfer).

Ways to get an Interactive Shell

[wdizon@login1 ~]$

This terminal indicates the user is in their HOME directory (~) on login01. From here, we can use the convenience script interactive or the direct command salloc to request and allocate compute cores and GPUs.

interactive

$ interactive

With no other parameters specified, interactive will request a single core on a compute node, for one (1) hour.

This can be modified with normal salloc commands, like -t 120 (120 minutes) or -G 1 (allocate a GPU). More details are found in the above link about requesting and allocating above.

salloc

$ salloc -c 15 -N 2 -n 2

salloc is the preferred way to get resources. This is because it encourages all users to be specific about their needs and the syntax is identical to all supercomputers using slurm as the resource scheduler.