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Undergraduate Users

Wee-archie is a 448 core (20 standard node + 8 GPU node) high performance computer available to undergraduate students for computationally intensive project work. Wee-archie is the teaching counterpart of ARCHIE, the 2560 core High Performance Computer, which is based at the University of Strathclyde and managed by the ARCHIE-WeSt Research Computing Centre.

Wee-archie is accessed via the main ARCHIE-WeSt login nodes (archie-w, archie-e, archie-s & archie-t) and the compute nodes have the following specification:

Specification

20 compute nodes (Dell C6220 servers)

  • 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2660 8 core 2.2GHz CPU's
  • 16 cores per node
  • 256 cores in total
  • 64 GB RAM per node
  • access to the ARCHIE wide 230TB GPFS high performance filesystem

8 compute nodes with GPUs (Dell C6220 servers + NVidia P100 GPU)

  • As above but with one NVidia P100 GPU (3584 CUDA cores and 16GB RAM)

Access

Project supervisors must apply for access on behalf of their students by completing the online form:

https://www.archie-west.ac.uk/for-academia/apply/undergraduate-students

Wee-archie is accessible and operates in the same way as the rest of (big-) ARCHIE, however there are a few important differences:

Training and support of undergraduate users

The ARCHIE-WeSt support team does not have the available staff resource to provide training and support of undergraduate users. Therefore, supervisors are responsible for the training and support of undergraduate users.

We recommend that where possible, supervisors should take advantage of postgraduate demonstrators who have experience of ARCHIE-WeSt.

Supervisors should make use of the material on this website to train students, paying close attention to the "key differences" listed below. Access will only be granted to students once they have passed the "wee-archie access quiz" on the ARCHIE-WeSt Training class on MyPlace (users can self-register).

Training and Support of Undergraduates

Supervisors are responsible for the training and support of undergraduate users.

Users will only be granted access after passing the "wee-archie access quiz" on MyPlace.

Key differences of wee-archie compared to big-ARCHIE

  1. There are only 16 cores on each node
  2. There is only 64 GB RAM per node (4GB RAM per core)

  3. Users will be restricted to:

    • 16 cores per job (a single node or equivalent)
    • 48 cores in total (three nodes)
    • a maximum runtime of 48 hours
    • 100GB soft & 200GB hard disk quota

  4. Jobs should be submitted to the teaching partition(s) 

    e.g. #SBATCH --partition=teaching        (for standard CPU nodes)
or   #SBATCH --partition=teaching-gpu    (for nodes with a P100 GPU)

    Access to the GPU nodes is not granted by default and needs to be requested.

  5. Jobs should use the teaching account 

    e.g. #SBATCH --account=teaching

  6. Sample job scripts are available on ARCHIE in /opt/software/job-scripts and are named according to the convention software-teaching.sh e.g.

    starccm-teaching.sh
gromacs-teaching.sh
lammps-teaching.sh
gaussian-teaching.sh