About
The Engineering Research Compute Cluster (ENGR Cluster) is a medium-scale installation of heterogeneous compute nodes, supporting both common computational tasks, specific Engineering software applications, and specialized nodes for specific research group tasks.
Accessing the Research Compute Cluster
All password prompts for logging into systems in ENGR Cluster is with your WUSTL Key.
The ENGR Cluster can be accessed via SSH via these hosts:
ssh.engr.wustl.edu
ssh2.engr.wustl.edu
or the Open Ondemand interface at:
https://compute.engr.wustl.edu
WUSTL Key Issues
If you are having issues with your WUSTL Key logging into the above systems, make sure you can log into another WUSTL-key'd service, like SIS. If you cannot, call 314-933-3333 for support any time of day.
If you cannot specifically SSH to the hosts above, your IP may have been blocked by automatic systems. Try the other host listed, or, join the WUSTL VPN (https://it.wustl.edu/items/connect/) to gain a new unblocked IP.
You can check what IP you are coming from at the website http://whatismyip.com, and if you feel it is blocked, try the alternate methods above, and email that IP address to support@seas.wustl.edu with a note of when you last tried logging in, and which host you were logging in to.
RIS Storage Access
RIS storage is accessed at the path
/storage1/piname
where "piname" is the WUSTL Key login of the PI or storage owner.
Access is granted via WUSTL Key - on the ENGR cluster, this translates to having a valid Kerberos ticket. If you’ve SSH’d into a ENGR host with your WUSTL Key, you will have a valid ticket. If you have logged in with an SSH Key, you will not.
To generate or refresh a Kerberos ticket, use the command
kinit
and enter your WUSTL Key when prompted.
Kerberos tickets in the ENGR cluster have these properties:
- From the initial password entry, Kerberos tickets last for 10 hours
- Tickets on ssh.seas.wustl.edu or ssh2.seas.wustl.edu will not refresh automatically after 10 hours.
- Inside a submitted batch job, tickets will refresh for 7 days from their original creation/refresh time. This means that if you log in to ssh.seas.wustl.edu on Monday, and submit a job Wednesday, the ticket only has 5 days of life left!
- When your Kerberos ticket expires, your access to RIS storage will break.
If you habitually leave live connections to the terminal machines, you may want to get into the habit of “kinit”ing your ticket before submitting a job.
Long Jobs With RIS Storage
If you are using RIS storage with your job, and the ticket expires, this will break the job. In order to avoid this, you can generate a keytab file that allows the cluster to renew your Kerberos ticket for much longer - this keytab will last until you change your WUSTL Key password, at which point it must be regenerated.
Instructions for generating keytabs are on the cluster website at https://compute.engr.wustl.edu
VNC Sessions, Jupyter Notebooks, VSCode IDEs and RIS Storage
At the current time, VNC jobs do not come pre-armed with your Kerberos key from your initial login to the web service. If you have created a keytab as described above, it will initialize when the VNC session starts. Otherwise, if you wish to access the RIS storage from inside a VNC session, please do
kinit
You will be prompted for your WUSTL Key. You should also do this before submitting a LSF job from inside a VNC session. After you authenticate, you will have an active Kerberos key and will be able to access the RIS storage mounts.
Software on the Compute Cluster