Guidelines for Using the Sage Cluster

This document sets out guidelines for using the Sage cluster. These guidelines exist so that users are aware of the available computing resources on the Sage cluster. The Sage cluster consists of four similar computers and one Solaris machine:

Prioritizing usage

The machine sage.math is primarily for Sage development. Ideally, you should use that machine to develop code, upgrade/update packages, porting packages/code, reviewing/working on tickets, etc. If you have a long job to run on the Sage cluster, first consider whether your job is related to any of these goals.

Some questions relating to using any of the above machines include:

Most of the time, you shouldn't run long jobs on boxen.math because that machine is for web services. We want to minimize the downtime of the public notebook server, the Sage wiki server, the trac bug server, the Sage main website, and websites of other projects hosted on boxen.math. Please first consider using geom.math or mod.math before running long jobs on sage.math.

The machines mod.math and geom.math can be used for running very long jobs. Running long jobs on any of those machines would minimize disruption to your long jobs because release managers don't usually compile, run and doctest Sage on any of those machines, unless absolutely necessary. Many people actually use sage.math to compile, run and doctest Sage. Because building and doctesting Sage is very parallelizable, it is useful (and common practice) to use a significant portion of the machines resources for a relatively short amount of time, as opposed to a small amount of resources for a large amount of time.

Running a long job on the machine sage.math --- where the job can take days, weeks, or months --- can significantly affect the development, compilation, and doctesting of the Sage library. When you work on a ticket, whether that be developing code or reviewing other people's code, you can use sage.math to parallel doctest the Sage library with that new code using 6 to 10 threads. This should significantly reduce the development and doctesting time from about 3 to 6 hours with one thread, to about 30 minutes with 16 threads.

The sooner that tickets and code get merged in Sage, the sooner that users get to use new code and be grateful to developers, patch authors and reviewers for providing useful software. So before running any long jobs on sage.math, please consider whether a job can be run on any of the other machines instead.

From any of the machines on the Sage cluster, you can ssh to any of the other three machines. Whenever ssh'ing to another server, you could use the syntax

ssh -C -x -a <remote-machine>

Here's an explanation of these options:

Minimizing disruption and downtime

The partition /home is shared via NFS with the following machines:

which means that a running job shouldn't do a lot of disk I/O under /home. Instead, you should use a fast-ish local partition such as /scratch on sage.math when logged in to sage.math. However, /scratch is mounted as a local disk on sage.math and shared with other compute nodes via NFS. A significant implication is that you should avoid doing a lot of disk I/O under /scratch when logged in to machines other than sage.math.

At least in version 4.2.1, Sage uses a temporary directory under your /home directory, so it's also a good idea to set the environment variable DOT_SAGE to a local partition or directory such as /tmp. You could do that as follows:

export DOT_SAGE=/tmp/<your-username>/

where you could replace <your-username> with the username you use to login to compute nodes on the Sage cluster.

The directory /dev/shm is a fast-ish local ramdisk you could use for jobs that require disk I/O. On geom.math, the local directory /space serves a similar purpose to /scratch on sage.math. You could create your own working directory whose name reflect your username, and then proceed to use that directory as your scratch directory. For example, you could compile Sage under that working directory and have a running job do disk I/O under it.