What should I think about when giving a course (or workshop) at UPPMAX?

Avoid maintenance windows, make sure your users have accounts and book reservations if needed.

Booking a reservation

Please also read Using your reservation below in order to find out how you tell SLURM that you want to use your reservation.

If you have computer room labs, you can get reservation for those times so your students do not need to wait in the queue, competing with other jobs.

To get reservations, make sure to contact support@uppmax.uu.se at least two weeks in advance with the course details, number of students that will attends labs and the resources needed (e.g. 6 cores per student).

Note that we will not create reservations for extended time periods (e.g. project work) or what we deem unreasonable resource usage (an extremely clear example would be a request for 10 nodes/student).

Using your reservation

When the day and time of your reservation, SLURM will be able to use the reservation for all members of the course project automatically. There is no need to specify the reservation on the command line or in a job script.

Note. If you use the command interactive you should specify a time over one hour, in order for the queuing system to put your job into the reservation e.g.

interactive -A course_project -p core -n 1 -t 04:00:00

User accounts

Unless forced, your students will not have accounts at the start of the lab. It will take the students 1-2 hours to go through the steps for applying for an account. Unless you want to spend that time helping them at the first lab, make sure that they have their accounts ready.

We strongly recommend having a mandatory step (possibly "rewarded" with bonus points and or half a credit) at least one week prior to the first lab where the students should log in and run

$ id

and report this back to you. This also gives you a chance to verify the students have the right group membership and will have access to course specific files.

Note that for persons not affiliated with a Swedish academic instution, getting an account requires the approval of the common user agreement on paper along with a paper copy of an acceptable id (e.g. passport) to be sent to Gothenburg. Normally this does not take very long from within Sweden, but it helps if the process is started earlier.

Maintenance windows

UPPMAX have reserved the time on (and following) the first Wednesday each month for maintenance windows, so if needed, the system may be inaccessible or in other ways not normally functioning for a couple of days. Try to not schedule labs Wednesday through Friday following the first Wednesday of the month to be on the safe side.