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If you don't already have an account, see the Request Access page to get one.

Logging on to Talapas

For UO users, your username on Talapas will be your Duck ID.  (That is, if your email address is alice@uoregon.edu, your Talapas username will be "alice".)  Your password is the same university-wide, and can be managed at the UO the UO password reset page.

For non-UO users, you will have received a username and password in the email granting you access.

Talapas currently has two four login nodes:

• talapas-ln1login1.talapas.uoregon.edu
• login2.talapas.uoregon.edu
• login3.talapas.uoregon.edu
• login4.talapas-ln2.uoregon.edu

These hosts are entirely equivalent.

  You can use whichever seems less busy, or use hostname talapas-login  but the recommended method is by logging in via the load balancer:

         login.talapas.uoregon.edu

to be sent to one randomly.logged into one of the four nodes with the least amount of traffic.

If you are logging in from a Linux or Mac OS X workstation, open a terminal and type

ssh myusername@talapas-ln1myusername@login.talapas.uoregon.edu

If you are logging in from Windows, download an SSH client like Putty or MobaXterm and do the equivalent.

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If you're accessing Talapas from Linux or Mac OS X, you can use scp to transfer files.  For example, type

scp chr1.fasta myusername@talapas-ln1myusername@login[1-4].uoregon.edu:.

to copy the named file to your Talapas home directory in either of the 4 login nodes (login1,...,login4)

There are also GUI tools available for file transfer via SCP or SFTP.  Filezilla is available for all common platforms.

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See Storage for more details.

Software

Read about how to find software on our Software page.  Read on for the absolute basics.

Talapas uses the Lmod environment module software to provide access to the various installed software packages.  Type

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The above command is good for running single programs.  If you'll be doing something that will invoke multiple parallel processes or threads, like a parallel make or multi-threaded program, you might want to add a --cpus-per-task=N flag to allocate more cores.

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  Note that on Talapas, using --ntasks (or -n) instead of --cpus-per-task (or -c) is virtually always the wrong thing to do, and will make your session run more slowly.

Running Graphical Interactive Jobs

If your interactive job will involve a program like rstudio, which uses X11 to provide graphical output, there are several options.  You can use the srun --x11 flag like so to forward your X11 connection back to your workstation X server.

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This job used about 193MB (197180K) of RAM at its peak , and ran for a bit over 16 hours.See Memory for more details.

There's also a helper script 'seff' that provides similar information and is a bit easier to type.  Just say "seff JOBID".

See Memory for more details.

Special Handling for Quarterly Maintenance Events

Approximately once per quarter, Talapas is taken down for maintenance, to update software and hardware, make repairs, etc.  To minimize the disruption, SLURM reservations are added to "block out" those times.  If you take no special steps, a job request that you make that runs into a maintenance window will be held and run after the window.

This is often what you'd want.  But, sometimes you might want a job to start right away, even if the entire optimal running time is not available.  You can specify this using the "--min-time" flag to specify a minimum acceptable time limit for the job.

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#SBATCH --time=0-8:00:00
#SBATCH --time-min=0-1:00:00
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Using the above flag, you'll normally get a time limit of eight hours.  But, if there are reservations that would delay the start of your job, SLURM will consider any  time limit down to one hour to be acceptable and start the job immediately.  (SLURM will prefer the largest available time limit.)

Being a Good Cluster Citizen

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