Teton

Overview

The Teton Compute Environment (Teton) is a high performance computing (HPC) cluster that offers over 500 compute nodes and 1.2 PB of storage, with an expected uptime of 98%, allowing researchers to perform computation-intensive analyses on datasets of various sizes.

Teton can be securely accessed anywhere, anytime using SSH connectivity with UWyo two-factor authentication.

Teton hardware

This links to a summary of the Teton hardware.

Teton Storage

Teton’s storage is divided into three isolated filesystems to ensure that researchers have control of where their data are, and who can access it.

/home: for configuration files and software user specific installations.
/project: a collaborative area shared among project members.
/gscratch: a large and fast storage area to temporarily store large data sets while they are being processed. This area is not backed up and is subject to periodic purges of old data.

Software

This links to a summary of the Teton software.

Project and Account Requests

For research projects, UWyo faculty members (Principal Investigators or PIs) can request a research project on ARCC HPC (high performance computing) resources, using this form. Note: you can also submit an initial set of users using this form.

User Accounts require a valid UWyo email address and a UWyo-Affiliated PI sponsor. UWyo faculty members can sponsor their own accounts, while students, post-doctoral researchers, or research associates must use their PI as their sponsor. Users with a valid UWyo email address can be added in the project request or added later, using the Request New Project form.

Non-UWyo external collaborators (Ex_Co) must be sponsored by a current UWyo faculty member. Ex_Co accounts can be requested here.

Once access is granted, connection to ARCC HPC resources may be established via SSH. Note that SSH connections require Two-Factor Authentication.

Condo Model

The model for sustaining the Condo program is premised on faculty and principal investigators using equipment purchase funds from their grants or other available funds to purchase compute nodes (individual servers) which are then added to the Teton compute cluster. Condo computing resources are used simultaneously by multiple users. Teton is a condo model resource and as such, investors do have priority on invested resources. This is implemented through preemption and jobs not associated with the investment could be requested on the system when investor submits jobs. However, if the investor chooses not to implement preemption on their resources, ARCC can disable preemption while offering next-in-line access if that mode is preferred.

There are default concurrent limits in place to prevent individual project accounts and users from saturating the cluster away from others. The default limits are listed below. To incentivize investments into the condo system, investors will have their limits increased.

The system leverages a fairshare mechanism to offer a mechanism for projects that execute jobs on a more rare occasion priority over those who continuously run jobs on the system. To incentivize investments into the condo system, investors will have their fairshare value increased as well.

Finally, individual jobs occur runtime limits based on a study that was performed in ~2014 such that our maximum walltime for a compute job is 7 days. ARCC is currently evaluating this to determine whether the orthogonal limits of CPU count and walltime are optimal operational modes. ARCC is considering concurrent usage limits based on a relational combination of CPU count, Memory, and walltime that would allow more flexibility for different areas of science. There will likely still be an upper limit on individual compute job walltime as ARCC will not allow infinite job walltime and due to possible hardware faults.

Citing Teton

For information on citing Teton, please reference the citing section in Documentation and Help.