Phase 3 System

Important

On Tuesday June 4th 2024 at 9am “PHASE 3” will be switched OFF and will be moved to Bristol to be part of Isambard 3 which will be launched over the summer.

Isambard Phase 3, just like the MACS, hosts many nodes of different architectures:

Phase 3 nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with the Cray software stack.

All nodes are connected via Slingshot 10. The login nodes are connected to the Internet via a 10 Gigabit link to the Janet Network.

Lustre Storage

Due to migration to newer storage old data can found read-only at /lustreOld e.g. previous home directory at /lustreOld/home

We have already copied over software from /lustreOld/software/x86 to the new /lustre location.

Nvidia GPU

There is a Nvidia SDK install on each of the ampereq nodes in /opt/nvidia but you can also load a latest version using:

module use /software/x86/tools/nvidia/hpc_sdk/modulefiles
module load nvhpc/22.9

To submit a job with 1 GPU and 1 CPU use:

qsub -I -q ampereq -l select=1:ncpus=1:ngpus=1:mem=100G

This sets CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES to a UUID (unique id) of a GPU that PBS provided you and sets 100GB of memory along with 1 CPU.

AMD GPU

There is a AMD ROCM install on each instinctq nodes in /opt/rocm but you can also use the Cray compiler.

module load craype-accel-amd-gfx908

To submit a job with 1 GPU and 1 CPU use:

qsub -I -q instinctq -l select=1:ncpus=1 -l place=excl

For now the PBS is not setup to support reserving AMD GPUs so we ask users to exclusively use the node (with -l place=excl) and not specify ngpus in the resource line.

Cray Compiler

Compiling

Compiling can be perfomed on the p3-login node.

The default modules should provide the required environment.

cc test.c

To compile with MPI and OpenMP, the following can be used:

cc -h omp test.c

Running a job

For example to run a job on a single node the milanq:

qsub -q milanq -l select=1:ncpus=128:mpiprocs=128

To run on 2 nodes you could use:

qsub -q milanq -l select=2:ncpus=128:mpiprocs=128 -l place=scatter:excl

This will place each request on different nodes - since we have hyperthreading enabled it would otherwise place them on the same node.

Then use Cray module to launch the MPI job

module load cray-pals
mpirun hostname

Intel OneAPI

Compiling

Compiling can be perfomed on the p3-login node.

Please load the IntelOneApi module for both mpi and compiler

module load IntelOneApi/compiler
module load IntelOneApi/mpi

This will make the standard Intel tools available - being AMD processors we recommend using advice from AMD which suggests using

icc -march core-avx2

To compile with MPI, the following can be used:

mpiicc -march core-avx2 -fopenmp

Running a job

The system can use Intel MPI and related Compilers (load modules as above). For example to run a job on a single node the milanq:

qsub -q milanq -l select=1:ncpus=128:mpiprocs=128

To run on 2 nodes you could use:

qsub -q milanq -l select=2:ncpus=128:mpiprocs=128 -l place=scatter:excl

This will place each request on different nodes - since we have hyperthreading enabled it would otherwise place them on the same node.

Then use ssh to laucnh the MPI job

mpirun -launcher ssh hostname

Apptainer/Singularity

To allow containers to run on the system, which is common for GPU applications, we have installed apptainer (fork from original Singularity project).

Nvidia

For example to download a Nvidia Tensorflow container run on the login node:

apptainer pull docker://nvcr.io/nvidia/tensorflow:23.11-tf2-py3

To run this on a Nvidia GPU

qsub -I -q ampereq -l select=1:ngpus=1:mem=64g

Then run on the compute node:

apptainer shell tensorflow_23.11-tf2-py3.sif

Due to issue with initialisation of these containers with apptainer, rerun a script:

source /etc/shinit_v2

Then run python3 with some Tensorflow code.

AMD

Similar can be done on AMD GPUs in instinctq downloading container on login node:

apptainer pull docker://rocm/tensorflow

Then run on the AMD GPU queue.

qsub -I -q instinctq -l select=1:mem=64g -l place=excl

Finally run the container

apptainer shell tensorflow_latest.sif

And then turn python3