Unity News
Unity Team Seeking RAs for Spring 2024: Apply Now!
Description
Position title: CDS-RCD Research Assistant (RA)
The Center for Data Science (CDS) in partnership with Research Computing and Data (RCD) at UMass Amherst is looking for up to three PhD student research assistants (RAs) for 10 - 20 hours per week during Spring 2024. RAs will support a broad range of researchers using the Unity HPC platform. As a facilitation RA, you have the opportunity to learn about high performance computing, computational science, and research computing facilitation under the guidance of experienced research computing facilitators. Your tasks include assisting users of the Unity cluster with cluster usage, including account creation, access, workflow execution, and software management. You have the opportunity to contribute to the user education experience, including contributing to user documentation and assisting with or conducting workshops. This position is open to all PhD students with a research computing aspect, including students in CICS, CNS, COE, and CSBS, or anyone with a Linux or Unix background. This position has flexible scheduling.
Read More...Winter Break at Unity
Happy holidays, Unity Community!
The Unity facilitation and systems administration teams will have reduced services and help hours from Monday, December 18, 2023, until Tuesday, January 2, 2024. During this time, please allow additional time for responses on help tickets and the Unity User Community Slack. In addition, we will not be holding Zoom office hours until the UMass Amherst Spring semester begins on February 1, 2024. The first session of Zoom office hours in 2024 is Tuesday, February 6, 2024, from 2:30 pm to 4 pm EST. If you need a “face-to-face” meeting during this time, please email hpc@umass.edu.
Read More...New Documentation Launched
Going green!
The Unity documentation, portal, and Open OnDemand have a green new look! To better reflect Unity’s collaborative nature and residence at the MGHPCC, we’ve adopted a green color scheme across our services.
Refreshed documentation
We’ve launched our new documentation site! In addition to technical documentation, the new site features Unity news, events, and expanded Unity cluster and team information. If you have any questions or feedback about the new website, please email hpc@umass.edu.
Read More...Unity Community Newsletter: Fall 2023
Dear Unity Community
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Unity User Community newsletter! In these correspondences, we hope to inform the community about Unity updates and changes, advertise workshops and educational events, and highlight the phenomenal research that relies on Unity for computing resources.
As we move into the final quarter of 2023, we’re reflecting on where Unity has been and where we hope to go in the future. In the past year, the Unity team has expanded to include five systems administrators and five research computing facilitators from UMass Amherst, University of Rhode Island, and UMass Dartmouth. We’ve welcomed users from UMass Lowell and UMass Boston, along with smaller institutions in our area, onto the system. We now support over 2000 users across 450 research groups.
Unity itself has grown as quickly as its community. Since November 2022, we’ve added over 15,000 CPUs, 1200 GPUs, and ~100TB of RAM. Unity users have completed jobs totaling over 10,000 years of CPU time.
Unity’s growth is shaped by the needs and experiences of our users, including you! Your feedback on your Unity experience is invaluable and appreciated. To connect with the Unity team, please consider joining our Unity Community Slack or emailing us at hpc@umass.edu.
Sincerely,
Tom Bernardin
Director, UMass Amherst Research Computing and Data
Unity Feature Announcements
As of 1:30 pm on 7/21, the Gypsum nodes and storage are operational again. Thank you for your patience.
In addition, we’d like to take this opportunity to announce a few new Unity features and remind you of our upcoming GPU workshop!
Introduction to Using GPUs on Unity
Unity facilitator Connor Kenyon of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will present a workshop on the available GPU resources on Unity. During this workshop, participants will gain experience accessing and utilizing a GPU in both interactive Jupyter sessions as well as with SLURM. Talking points will include requesting an overview of available resources, accessing GPUs on Unity, and a brief introduction to available GPU accelerated software as well as tools for profiling GPU code. This workshop will provide direct practical experience by setting up a Jupyter notebook environment for popular machine learning software such as PyTorch and tensorflow on the Unity OnDemand interface. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one on the Unity portal.
Read More...Unity Summer Events
Today we have three event updates to share. All workshops will be recorded, so there will be the opportunity to view later if you can’t join us live!
Predict protein structures on Unity with Colabfold
TODAY (6/30/23 at 2 pm Eastern) is the Predict protein structures on Unity with Colabfold Workshop!!
Unity facilitator Cecile Cres of the University of Rhode Island will present a workshop on ColabFold. During this workshop, participants will gain experience with protein structure prediction using Colabfold. Talking points will include prediction of single and complex structures, how to request computer resources efficiently and how to interpret the predicted protein models. This workshop will provide direct practical experience by using a Jupyter notebook on the Unity OnDemand interface. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one at https://account.unityhpc.org/
Read More...Unity Portal / Login Maintenance 6/30 & Scratch and NCBI Announcements
Happy Friday! We have three announcements today:
Login Node and OOD Portal Maintenance
On Friday, June 30, 2023, from 7 am to 9 am EDT, the Unity login nodes, Unity portal, and Open OnDemand portal will be inaccessible for maintenance. No running batch jobs will be affected, but interactive jobs may be disconnected. Open OnDemand jobs are considered “batch” jobs and will be able to be resumed after maintenance, but you will experience some interruption.
Read More...Unity Open OnDemand Server Upgrade 6/14/23
In order to resolve some sluggishness and instability in our Open OnDemand server, ood.unity.rc.umass.edu will be offline for a server upgrade from 7 am to 9 am on 6/14/23.
Read More...ColabFold and `srun`
We have two announcements today: a clarification on a Slurm change to the srun feature and the details of a workshop about ColabFold on Unity.
srun inside srun
Our Slurm update changed the behavior of the srun command when used inside an interactive srun session. If you want to use srun to launch tasks in an interactive srun session, launch the “outer” srun with the “–overlap” flag and it should have the same behavior as before.
Read More...Unity Maintenance Concluded
Unity Users,
We are pleased to announce Unity is now open for use again following our June 5 through June 10, 2023 maintenance. Thank you for your patience as we performed necessary upgrades and maintenance to keep Unity running smoothly.
We’ve included a copy of the change list below. If you have any questions or encounter any issues, please submit a ticket to hpc@umass.edu.
In addition to the announced changes below, we’re currently resolving a problem with the Mathematica license. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have it fixed shortly.
Read More...