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Blue Waters

Logging in

To access Blue Waters via command line, point your SSH client to bwbay.ncsa.illinois.edu:

ssh -l username bwbay.ncsa.illinois.edu

If instructed by the presenter, add -Y flag to enable X11 forwarding (for applications with GUI).

Interactive jobs

To start an interactive job, execute qsub command with -I flag, for example:

qsub -I -lwalltime=01:00:00,nodes=1:ppn=16:xk

This will start an interactive session on 1 XK (CPU + GPU) node for 1 hour.

Batch (non-interactive) jobs

For non-interactive batch jobs, use qsub command without the -I flag:

qsub job_script.sh

where job_script.sh is the name of a text file containing special #PBS comments/directives and SHELL commands. For example, to set walltime to 1 hour while requesting 2 XE (CPU-only) nodes, one would add the following lines to the job_script.sh:

#PBS -l walltime=01:00:00
#PBS -l nodes=2:ppn=32:xe

The details of your job script's contents depend on the type of job you intend to run and should be provided to you by the presenter.

`aprun` command

To execute code on compute nodes, make sure to use aprun command in your batch job scripts and in interactive jobs like so: aprun -n 16 executable