What is coyote?

coyote is about 568 cores spread over 70+
nodes. the queue-system is torque (ie, pbs) and not
sge (like darwin), but the translation should not
cause you any suffering.

there are also three (3) large-memory interactive
nodes, viz super-genius, mega-genius, and ultra-genius.
sg has 64G ram and the others 192G.

Cluster rules & etiquette

Amy Keating, a BE faculty member, administers coyote. She has four rules for the cluster:

1. ALL jobs must be submitted through the queuing system. It is not ok to directly run jobs on any of the nodes (other than the designated interactive nodes ethelbert and supergenius)
2. No jobs should ever be run on the head node.
3. Do not submit more than 500 jobs at a time to most queues (1000 jobs in the "quick" queue; 10 jobs in the ultra queue)
4. Comply promptly with all requests from me, my postdoc Vladimir Potapov, or our system administrators (Greg, at TechSquare), e.g. if asked to kill jobs or to change how you are using the cluster.

She also sends a monthly reminder to the email list:

Here is the monthly reminder of our obligation to cite NSF award 0821391 in all work using the cluster. Please include the acknowledgement below in all publications that make use of the cluster AND send a copy of the citation to keating@mit.edu and mgwa@mit.edu.

"This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0821391."

"Our ability to obtain funds in the future depends on high-quality documentation of our past achievements!" – Amy

There is a node set aside for interactive work. You can get there by ssh super-genius.

The folder /tmp is free for use, but you are asked to clean up after yourself.

Things to note

• You can ssh to coyote only from MIT IP addresses. This means you either need to be on campus or be connected via the MIT VPN. (This was to mitigate security attacks on the cluster.)
• The default shell on coyote is tcsh. To change to bash, issue: chsh -p /bin/bash my_username. You might need to use usermod rather than chsh.

Getting started

• Email Greg (a.k.a. "[greg]") bio-admin@techsquare.com. Greg will request confirmation that you're in the lab, so it's best if you immediately cc a lab member that Greg already knows.
• Consider adding coyote to you ~/.ssh/config file.
• Consider joining the coyote-users mailman list.
• Make sure you understand the difference between the head node and the queues before you start doing any work.

Things for fun

Why you should be on the mailing list...

To: coyote-users@mit.edu
From: bio-admin@techsquare.com
Date: Mon, 02 May 2011 08:54:49 -0400
Subject: coyote returns

hello coyote users-

one of the storage-machines at coyote
fell over yesterday, rendering coyote
pretty much useless.

i believe that we are returned to service
now, but please let me know if you notice
anything untowards...

[greg]