Instability on Clusters after May 13 Downtime

We've been experiencing some instability on the clusters (particularly Cardinal and Ascend). 

OSU College of Medicine Compute Service

Beginning April 30, 2025, all College of Medicine (CoM) projects without a separate MOU established with OSC will be limited to running exclusively on the Ascend cluster, specifically on the nextgen partition. All CoM jobs run on Ascend’s nextgen partition at zero cost, with priority scheduling.
CoM projects no longer have access to the Pitzer or Cardinal clusters unless a separate MOU is in place. If you are interested in continuing to use other clusters, or if you would like to learn more about service options, please reach out to oschelp@osc.edu.

Key information:

  • When using CoM project, please add --partition=nextgen in your job scripts or specify ‘nextgen’ as the partition name with OnDemand apps. Failure to do so will result in your job being rejected.
  • A list of software available on Ascend can be found here: https://www.osc.edu/content/available_software_list_on_next_gen_ascend
  • Always specify the module version when loading software. For example, instead of using module load intel, you must use module load intel/2021.10.0. Failure to specify the version will result in an error message. 
  • More details about new project creation, FY26 budget setup, and other administrative updates will be shared soon.
  • To verify whether your project falls under CoM, run the following command from your terminal (on Cardinal or Ascend; On Pitzer, you’ll need to load Python first: module load python/3.9-2022.05, replacing project_code with your actual project account: python /users/PZS0645/support/bin/parentCharge.py project_code

Hardware information: 

The nodes on next-generation Ascend features 250 Dell PowerEdge R7545 two-socket/dual GPU servers, each with:

  • 2 AMD EPYC 7H12 processors (2.60 GHz, each with 60 usable cores) 
  • 2 NVIDIA A100 GPUs with 40GB memory each, PCIe, 250W
  • 472GB usable Memory
  • 1.92TB NVMe internal storage
  • HDR100 Infiniband (100 Gbps)

Please check this Ascend page for more information on its hardware, programming and software environment, etc. 

Governance

The CoM compute service is available to approved CoM users. A regular billing summary for all CoM PIs will be submitted to the OSU CoM Research Computing and Infrastructure Subcommittee (RISST) for review. PIs who are not eligible may be transitioned to a different agreement with OSC.

The committee will also review and consider requests for new project approvals or increases in storage quotas for existing projects.

Creating a new CoM project

Any user with the Primary Investigator (PI) role can request a new project in the client portal. Using the navigation bar, select Project, Create a new project. Fill in the required information. 

If you are creating a new academic project 

Choose ‘academic’ type as project type. Under the top charge account of CoM: 19600, choose an existing charge account of yours, or if you do not have one, create a new charge account and select the department the work will be under. Use 'unlimited' as the Budget type.

For more instructions. see Video Tutorial and Projects, budgets and charge accounts page. 

If you are creating a new classroom project 

Choose ‘classroom’ type as project type. Under the top charge account of CoM: 34754, choose an existing charge account of yours, or if you do not have one, create a new charge account. You will request a $500 budget.

For more instructions. see Video Tutorial and Classroom Project Resource Guide.

Connecting

To access compute resources, you need to log in to Ascend at OSC by connecting to the following hostname:

ascend.osc.edu

You can either use an ssh client application or execute ssh on the command line in a terminal window as follows:

ssh <username>@ascend.osc.edu

From there, you can run programs interactively (only for small and test jobs) or through batch requests. 

Running Jobs

OSC clusters are utilizing Slurm for job scheduling and resource management. Slurm , which stands for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management, is a widely used open-source HPC resource management and scheduling system that originated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Please refer to this page for instructions on how to prepare and submit Slurm job scripts. A compatibility layer that allows users to submit batch PBS job scripts is also available. However, we encourage userS to convert their Torque/Moab PBS batch scripts to Slurm.

Remember to specify your project codes in the Slurm batch jobs, such that:

#SBATCH --account=PCON0000

where PCON0000 specifies your individual project code.

File Systems

CoM dedicated compute uses the same OSC mass storage environment as our other clusters. Large amounts of project storage is available on our Project storage service. Full details of the storage environment are available in our storage environment guide.

Training and Education Resources

The following are resource guides and select training materials available to OSC users:

  • Users new to OSC are encouraged to refer to our New User Resource Guide page and an Introduction to OSC training video.
  • A guide to the OSC Client Portal: MyOSC. MySC portal is primarily used for managing users on a project code, such as adding and/or removing users.
  • Documentation on using OnDemand web portal can be found here. 
  • Training materials and tutorial on Unix Basics are here.
  • Documentation on the use of the XDMoD tool for viewing job performance can be found here.
  • The HOWTO pages, highlighting common activities users perform on our systems, are here.
  • A guide on batch processing at OSC is here.
  • For specific information about modules and file storage, please see the Batch Execution Environment page.
  • Information on Pitzer programming environment can be found here.

Getting Support

Contact OSC Help if you have any other questions, or need other assistance. 

Supercomputer: 
Ascend
Service: 
HPC