Unity News

On October 22, 2024, we will be upgrading all Unity servers from the current operating system (OS), Ubuntu 20.04, to the new LTS (long term support) version, 24.04. This is a critical update to the cluster to ensure continued security and stability. However, an OS update is a significant undertaking and there will be several changes that you should be aware of as a Unity user.

We will be updating this list on this page, so please bookmark for your reference during the update.

Hi Unity Users! Welcome back to the Unity Digest, which has shifted to a bi-weekly schedule since our last update. In this edition, you’ll find new and updated documentation, along with some key announcements. Let’s dive in!

NEW documentation 🎉

• R Parallelization. A secondary page to the Introduction to R on Unity docs that provides an overview on how to run R in parallel.

UPDATED documentation ✏️

• The Unity Nodes list was updated to add two new GPU features: fp64 and bf16; Node Features (Constraints) page provides the definitions under “GPU Feature”.
• The Unity GPUs page was updated to include a note about CUDA Compute Capability.
• The Slurm Cheat Sheet was updated to include Slurm commands for adjusting job priority.

ANNOUNCEMENTS 📢

❗Reminder: Fall Onboarding: Don’t miss our Fall Onboarding Sessions on September 5th and 6th! For times and registration information, see our Upcoming Events page.

Hi Unity Users! After this week, the digest will transition to a bi-weekly schedule, so you’ll receive these updates every two weeks instead of every week.

This week’s edition features one new piece of documentation and two important announcements!

New documentation 🎉

• Renv documentation. Provides an overview of virtual environments in R, including how to create and activate an environment, install and update packages, save and move an environment, use Python with renv, and more.

Announcements 📢

• Get ready for our upcoming Fall Onboarding Sessions! For time and registration information, see our Upcoming Events page.
• This coming semester, we will update Unity to Ubuntu 24.04 since the current operating system, Ubuntu 20.04, is reaching the end of support soon. We’ll send additional information and instructions soon, but anticipate a day or two of downtime in mid to late October.

Hi Unity Users! This week’s Weekly Digest offers a sneak peek at some exciting documentation that’s coming your way soon!

Upcoming documentation additions 👀

• Renv documentation. Will provide an overview of virtual environments in R, including how to create and activate an environment, install and update packages, save and move an environment, use Python with renv, and more.
• R parallelization documentation. A secondary page to R docs that will provide an overview on how to run R in parallel.
• Apptainer documentation. Will provide an overview of Apptainer, including an introduction to containerization, how to load Apptainer and use it with Docker, how to write a SIF file and build an Apptainer SIF on Unity, how to use Apptainer and MPI, and more.
• Slurm script generator. An in-progress job submission script generator for Unity that is intended to make writing job submission scripts more efficient for users.

Hi Unity Users! This week’s edition of the Weekly Digest features new documentation, updated documentation, and an exciting announcement.

New documentation 🎉

• Venv - Virtual environments in Python. This is an overview of virtual environments in Python, including how to create, activate, move, and deactivate an environment, install packages, and submit a slurm job with venv.

Updated documentation ✏️

• SSH Connection documentation was updated to recommend configuring an SSH agent so that you don’t need to enter a password every time you use SSH keys for SSH connections.
• Module usage documentation was updated to suggest using module spider to search for specific software instead of module avail.

Announcements 📢

• We recently added 68 L40S GPUs to Unity! These are speedy, high VRAM GPUs suitable for machine learning. To use them, specify --constraint=l40s in either the gpu or gpu-preempt partitions.

Hi Unity Users! This week calls for a light digest, since most of the Unity Team have been at PEARC’24!

Useful updates to documentation

• Introduction to batch jobs was updated to include a section on checking job progress and a link to Monitor a batch job, a new documentation addition.
• Introduction to Slurm: The job scheduler was updated to include links to our recently added Slurm cheat sheet.
• Requesting an account was updated to clarify “PIs” as being faculty or select staff members who lead research groups.

Hi Unity Users! Welcome to the first edition of our Weekly Digest. This update will provide you all with an overview of the latest documentation, updates to existing documentation, cluster changes, and any other important announcements from your sysadmins. You can expect to receive these updates weekly. Let’s dive in!

New documentation

• Slurm cheat sheet
• How to contribute to the Unity User documentation. Only for those that have access to the behind-the-scenes of our website and are beginning to actively contribute to the Unity User Documentation.
• Monitor a batch job. Overview of how to monitor the progress of running batch jobs, including how to check job status and utilization.
• Large job counts documentation. When and how to submit a large number of jobs.
• Dataset docs. Provides information about each dataset available for Unity users to access. More to come.

Useful updates to documentation

• Troubleshooting for Windows PowerShell users: the SSH MACs issue (which is a result of a known bug in Microsoft’s SSH library) can be found in the Connect to Unity using the CLI section, along with relevant locations throughout the docs (e.g. Managing Files and Frequently Asked Questions).
• Interactive CLI Jobs: Salloc job submission overview. Language was edited here to be easier for users to follow and understand. It more clearly breaks up when users should use salloc vs. when users should use sbatch.
• Cluster Specification Storage doc was updated to include a storage expansion flowchart to help users decide what type of storage you need, or whether existing data is ideally placed.
• FileZilla documentation was updated to include how to add a default remote directory in FileZilla.

Cluster changes

If you submit a job with suspiciously low memory requests, Slurm may assume that you meant GB instead of the default MB and issue a warning. Similarly, if your requested memory slightly exceeds the threshold for higher RAM nodes, Slurm will also issue a warning.

We are pleased to announce Unity is now open for use again following our May 20 through 24, 2024 maintenance. Thank you for your patience as we performed necessary upgrades and maintenance to keep Unity running smoothly.

As of today (Friday, May 24, 2024), Unity /project directories hosted on the Northeast Storage Exchange (NESE) remain offline. Unfortunately, NESE maintenance will not conclude until Wednesday, May 29th. Until the NESE team gives the go-ahead to reconnect, /project directories will not be accessible from Unity. This only applies to directories under the /project directory. Work, home, and scratch directories are unaffected.

We are approaching our annual maintenance period, which coincides with the MGHPCC’s data center maintenance shutdown. Unity, including login access and storage, will be offline from Monday, May 20th at 9 am Eastern through Friday, May 24th for necessary maintenance and upgrades. During this time, you will not be able to log in to Unity, including Unity-connected storage. We appreciate your patience during this disruption and will work to restore Unity access as quickly as possible following network restoration Friday afternoon.

The University of Rhode Island’s Artificial Intelligence (URI AI) Lab invites the Unity community to attend the following data and computational science-focused workshops. The URI AI Lab is dedicated to interdisciplinary research and learning in the context of use-inspired AI. The Lab runs workshops on common AI tools and offers consultancy for research and educational projects. For questions regarding the URI AI Lab workshops, contact Indrani Mandal.