Intro to NCAR and NWSC

Introduction: This workshop will go over the NWSC, an External HPC resources frequently used by UW researchers. We will cover how to get access NWSC, and how to move your current HPC knowledge and project work to NWSC resources.

Course Goals:

• Give guidance on how to get access NWSC.

• Provide guidance for how to migrate your work from ARCC HPCs to NWSC .

What is NWSC

NWSC stands for the NCAR Wyoming Super Computing Center. NWSC is a high performance supercomputing resource specializing in Earth System Scientific Research. This facility is located in Cheyenne Wyoming and over 4000 users from over 575 universities utilize NWSC compute and data storage resources for their research.

Resource List

NWSC’s primary resources are available here from their website. As of July 15th 2024, they consist of:

• Derecho: Their newest HPE Cray EX supercomputing cluster installed in 2023. This is a heterogeneous cluster featuring:

  • 2488 compute nodes

  • 128 AMD Milan cores per node

  • 82 nodes with 4x NVIDIA A100 GPUs per node

• Casper: A heterogeneous cluster system of specialized analysis and visualization resources:

  • Composed of 100 Intel Skylake/Cascade Lake processors

  • Featuring large-memory, multi GPU, and high-throughput compute nodes

  • Configurations are specialized for Deep Learning and Machine Learning

• Data Storage for University Users via Campaign Storage

  • Accessible over Globus, command line interface, and through Casper nodes.

Users may view NWSC cluster status and queue activity here

NWSC’s Computational & Information Systems Lab (CISL)

CISL stands for NCAR’s Computational & Information Systems Lab. A large part of their mission is the support of advanced geosciences with world-class computation, data management and research in computational sciences.”

Requesting Resources on NWSC

NWSC Allocation requests are due as listed on the UW’s NWSC Allocations page. Requests typically fall into a few main categories:

• Large Computing Allocations

  • Requests are reviewed by Wyoming Resource Allocations Panel (WRAP)

  • Subject to specifications as listed here

  • Requests may be submitted online through the request form here: InfoReady

• Small Start-up and Educational Allocations

  • Should compose of work by UW graduate students, post docs, and faculty members working towards creating data, testing algorithms, etc.

  • Should be on behalf of future grant proposals or small allocations in support of funded scientific projects.

  • May also be used for an undergraduate or graduate resource for teaching.

  • Subject to the listed requirements available here

  • Requests may be submitted through a request form here: InfoReady

Getting Help on NWSC from CISL

NWSC Users may go to https://ithelp.ucar.edu/plugins/servlet/desk/site/rc to access NWSC’s customer portal.

This portal is only accessible with a NWSC/UCAR account after an allocation has been awarded and set up for you to use.

Getting help from ARCC with Migration

If you have been granted an allocation on NWSC and need help moving your data and software to NWSC, please reach out to UW ARCC at arcc-help@uwyo.edu to request assistance.