IDIA

This page contains information about how to access / interact with the IDIA computing infrastructure.

Official docs are available here.

Terminal access

There two dedicated nodes that are accessible via ssh. The first is for submitting jobs to the worker nodes via the slurm queue. If you have received your credentials then you can connect to this head node via a terminal like so:

$ ssh ianh@slurm.ilifu.ac.za

Jobs that require significant processing must not be run on the head node, but things like script editing and light file housekeeping is fine.

The second node that's worth knowing about is:

$ ssh ianh@transfer.ilifu.ac.za

which is a node dedicated to file transfer. If you need to copy large(ish) files in and out then this is the node to use. I often log into this, start a screen session, start wget to grab data from the archive, then detach from the screen and log out so the process can keep running while I go off and do other stuff.

CARTA

The URL to start CARTA inside a browser and remotely view images and cubes is https://carta.idia.ac.za/.

You can make files accessible to this service by logging in and placing them in /carta_share/users/.

Accessing nodes via a browser

If you have a dedicated node then you can access it via a web browser, e.g. https://racetrack.idia.ac.za. From here I think you can spawn Jupyter notebook instances and access files in your home area, but I never use the system this way so I can't really say more.