HPC documentation for Baobab and Yggdrasil

HPC Announce
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Dear HPC users,

We are happy to announce the opening of a brand new documentation for our HPC clusters Baobab and Yggdrasil ! We worked a lot in the last months to reorganise, rework, update, and add new content.

Many thanks to Yann Sagon, Luca Capello and Caroline Wilhem for their feedback and their contributions.

What is new :

  • Now using DokuWiki instead of Sphinx
  • Better organisation/separation of content
  • Up to date
  • New content
  • Not “Baobab-centric” anymore since our new baby Yggdrasil is coming very soon.

Using DokuWiki makes it much easier for us to edit the content. For now, edition is only allowed for a handful of people, however we do encourage you to provide content if you think it can help others. Simply post it on https://hpc-community.unige.ch/ and we will add it to the documentation after reviewing it.

So without further ado, we invite you to visit the start page :

https://doc.eresearch.unige.ch/hpc/start

You will notably find the following links :

We particularly recommend you to check Slurm and job management and Best practices.

We hope you will enjoy it and your feedback is welcome.

All the best,

Massimo Brero

5 Likes
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Thank you guys for all the hard work! The new documentation looks great! Best practices was especially nice to read through.

1 Like
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Thanks for the nice updated documentation!

One thing I think I would recommend to add is for the Windows access, that the Windows Subsystem for Linux makes access and use extremely easy and should now be the recommended way for all windows 10 users to connect (rather than PuTTY). Then all instructions are completely in line with the linux and mac OS, from login to file transfer. In fact, future versions will also be supporting X11 and Wayland natively.

Cheers,
Johnny

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Hi there,

NB , below is my personal opinion and not that of the HPC team.

I would disagree, by personal experience (i.e. this is how I do my work when obliged to be on Windows 10…) the recommended way should be the native OpenSSH with a local X11 server (e.g. VcXsrv Windows X Server download | SourceForge.net ), via an OpenPGP smartcard for SSH authentication.

Please remember that installing WSL could mean restrictions on other tools (e.g. VirtualBox , cf. FAQ's about Windows Subsystem for Linux | Microsoft Learn ), because WSL 2+ is practically speaking a powerful VM (cf. Comparing WSL Versions | Microsoft Learn ).

Moreover, if you need X2Go , you will anyway end up with a local PuTTY and X11 server.

With my (old) Debian Developer hat on and as someone who tried running Windows applications via Wine for a long time and in production, I found very disturbing all the “compatibility” layers and always prefer native solutions.

Thx, bye,
Luca

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As someone who uses both mac OS and Windows on a regular basis, I think documentation should point users to the options available to them which can then best suit their workflow. The WSL works infinitely better than PuTTY, has proper integration in the file system, integration in vs code and other popular IDEs on the windows side, it’s a much better solution.

Cheers,
Johnny