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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Getting Started on Aurora

Overview

*** ACCESS IS CURRENTLY ENABLED FOR ESP and ECP TEAMS ONLY ***

How to Get Access to Aurora (for New Users)

If You Already Have Access to Sunspot

If you already have access to Sunspot, all you need to do to gain access to Aurora is send an email to support@alcf.anl.gov requesting access to Aurora. In your email, include

  • Your ALCF username
  • Your institutional email address
  • The ESP or ECP project in which you are a member

For Aurora Early Science Program (ESP) Team Members

If you have never had access to Sunspot, here are the steps to gain access to Aurora:

  1. Verify that your institution has signed a CNDA with Intel that covers you.
  2. If you do not have an active ALCF account, request one using the ALCF Account request webpage. When you come to the part about joining a project, request the ProjectName_aesp_CNDA project.
  3. Acknowledge the Intel Terms of Use agreement (TOU) for the Aurora Software Development Kit (SDK) by submitting this form.

Getting a new ALCF account typically takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks (processing new access for foreign nationals is what can take weeks). After you acknowledge the TOU, there is a manual step that typically takes a few days. You will receive an email notifying you when Aurora access is granted, including some getting started instructions.

For Aurora Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Team Members

See this page for instructions.

Caveats About Using Aurora and Reporting Findings

NOTE: Sharing of any results from Aurora publicly no longer requires a review or approval from Intel. However, anyone publishing these results should include the following in their materials:

"This work was done on a pre-production supercomputer with early versions of the Aurora software development kit."

In addition, users should acknowledge the ALCF. Refer to the acknowledgement policy page for details. Please note that certain information on Aurora hardware and software is considered NDA and cannot be shared publicly.

Aurora is in the very early stages of the system deployment - do not expect a production environment!

Expect to experience:

  • Hardware instabilities - possible frequent downtime
  • Software instabilities - non-optimized compilers, libraries and tools; frequent software updates
  • Non-final configurations (storage, OS versions, etc...)
  • Short notice for downtimes (scheduled downtimes will be with 4 hr notice, but sometimes downtimes may occur with just an email notice). Notices go to the aurora-notify@alcf.anl.gov email list. All users with access are added to the list initially.

Getting Help

Email ALCF support at support@alcf.anl.gov for bugs, technical questions, software requests, reservations, priority boosts, etc...

  • ALCF's user support team will triage and forward the tickets to the appropriate technical SME as needed.
  • Expect turnaround times to be slower than on a production system as the technical team will be focused on stabilizing and debugging the system.

For faster assistance, consider contacting your project's POC at ALCF (project catalyst or liaison)

  • They are an excellent source of assistance during this early period and will be aware of common bugs and known issues.

ECP and ESP users will be added to a CNDA Slack workspace, where CNDA discussions may occur. An invite to the Slack workspace will be sent when a user is added to the Aurora resource.

Known Issues

See this page for known issues.

A known issues page can be found in the JLSE Wiki space used for NDA content. Note that this page requires a JLSE Aurora early hw/sw resource account for access. See page for other known issues.

Allocation usage

The allocation accounting system sbank is not yet installed on Aurora.

To obtain the usage information for all your projects on Aurora, issue the sbank command on another ALCF resource where sbank is installed, such as Polaris.

$ sbank-list-allocations -r aurora

For more information, see this page.

Transition to Aurora from Sunspot

Some guidance is provided here to aid users in the process of moving their work from the Sunspot Test & Development System.

Logging Into Aurora

Logging into Aurora is a two-stage process. You must first login through the bastion node via: 

ssh <username>@bastion.alcf.anl.gov
Then, type in the one-timepassword from your CRYPTOCard/MobilePASS+ token.

This bastion node is a pass-through erected for security purposes, and is not meant to host files. Once on the bastion, SSH to login.aurora.alcf.anl.gov. It is round robin to the aurora login nodes.

ssh <username>@login.aurora.alcf.anl.gov

As an expedient for initiating ssh sessions to Aurora login nodes via the bastion indirect nodes.

Note: Here remote machine means your laptop/desktop. 1. Create SSH keys on the laptop/desktop/remote machine. See "Creating SSH Keys" section on this page: 2. Add the lines listed below to your ~/.ssh/config file on the remote host. That is, you should do this on your laptop/desktop, from which you are initiating ssh login sessions to Aurora via bastion, and on other non-ALCF host systems from which you want to login to Aurora.

$ cat ~/.ssh/config
Host *.aurora.alcf.anl.gov aurora.alcf.anl.gov
    ProxyCommand ssh <your_ALCF_username>@bastion.alcf.anl.gov -q -W %h:%p
    User <your_ALCF_username>
    ControlMaster auto
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p
  1. Transfering your remote public key to bastion and aurora. 
Copy the public key (*.pub) from ~/.ssh/*.pub folder on the remote machine (your laptop) and append it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on bastion (bastion.alcf.anl.gov)
Copy the public key (*.pub) from ~/.ssh/*.pub folder on the remote machine (your laptop) and append it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on Aurora UAN. (login.aurora.alcf.anl.gov)

If you are trying to scp from other ALCF system (example Polaris) to Aurora , you need to do the above step replacing the remote machine (your laptop) with Polaris.

When you use an SSH proxy, it takes the authentication mechanism from the local host and applies it to the farthest-remote host, while prompting you for the “middle host” separately. So, when you run the ssh @login.aurora.alcf.anl.gov command on your laptop/desktop, you'll be prompted for two ALCF authentication codes - first the Mobilepass+ or Cryptocard passcode for the bastion, and then the SSH passphrase for Aurora. Likewise, when you run scp from a remote host to copy files to Aurora login nodes, you'll be prompted for two ALCF authentication codes codes - first the Mobilepass+ or Cryptocard passcode and then the SSH passphrase.

Proxies for outbound connections: Git, ssh, etc...

The Aurora login nodes don't currently have outbound network connectivity enabled by default. Setting the following environment variables will provide access to the proxy host. This is necessary, for example, to clone remote git repos.

# proxy settings
export HTTP_PROXY="http://proxy.alcf.anl.gov:3128"
export HTTPS_PROXY="http://proxy.alcf.anl.gov:3128"
export http_proxy="http://proxy.alcf.anl.gov:3128"
export https_proxy="http://proxy.alcf.anl.gov:3128"

SSH to other machines

To ssh to another machine from an Aurora login node, it can be helpful to add a proxyjump through Bastion in your .ssh/config file. The first password prompt would be for bastion, followed by a prompt for the remote machine.

$ cat .ssh/config
Host my.awesome.machine.edu
    ProxyJump bastion.alcf.anl.gov

$ ssh me@my.awesome.machine.edu

Additional guidance on scp and transfering files to Aurora is available and here.

Working with Git repos

The default SSH port is currently blocked on Aurora; by default, this prevents communicate with Git remotes that are SSH URLs such as the following.

git clone [user@]server:project.git
For a workaround for GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, the following can be added to your ~.ssh/config file. This requires updating your environment with the above proxy settings.

Host github.com
    User git
    hostname ssh.github.com

Host gitlab.com
    User git
    hostname altssh.gitlab.com

Host bitbucket.org
    User git
    hostname altssh.bitbucket.org

Host github.com gitlab.com bitbucket.org
    Port 443
    ProxyCommand /usr/bin/socat - PROXY:proxy.alcf.anl.gov:%h:%p,proxyport=3128

If you need to use something besides your default SSH key on Aurora for authentication to GitHub in conjunction with the above SSH workaround, you may set

export GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/specialGitKey"

where specialGitKey is the name of the private key in your .ssh directory, for which you have uploaded the public key to GitHub. The -F option can be used to specify a different SSH config file if needed; for example, -F none will completely ignore your config file, including the above workaround.

Hardware Overview

An overview of the Aurora system including details on the compute node architecture is available on the Machine Overview page.

File Systems and DAOS

Home and Project Directories

Home directories on Aurora are /home/username, available on login and compute nodes. This is provided from /lus/gecko/home. The default quota is 50 GB. Note that bastions have a different /home and the default quota is 500 MB.

Lustre project directories are under /lus/flare/projects. ALCF staff should use /lus/flare/projects/Aurora_deployment project directory. ESP and ECP project members should use their corresponding project directories. The project name is similar to the name on Polaris with an _CNDA suffix (e.g.: projectA_aesp_CNDA, CSC250ADABC_CNDA). Default quota is 1 TB. The project PI should email support@alcf.anl.gov if their project requires additional storage.

Note: The Project Lustre File system has changed from Gecko to Flare.

DAOS

The primary storage system on Aurora is not a file system, but rather an object store called the Distributed Asynchronous Object Store. This is a key-array based system embedded directly in the Slingshot fabric, which provides much faster I/O than conventional block-based parallel file systems such as Lustre (even those using non-spinning disk and/or burst buffers). Project PIs will have requested a storage pool on DAOS via INCITE/ALCC/DD allocation proposals.

Preproduction ESP and ECP Aurora project PIs should email support@alcf.anl.gov to request DAOS storage with the following information

  • Project name (e.g. FOO_aesp_CNDA)
  • Storage capacity (For ESP projects, if this is different than in the ESP proposal, please give brief justification)

See DAOS Overview for more on using DAOS for I/O.

Software Environment

The Aurora Programming Environment (Aurora PE) provides the OneAPI SDK, MPICH, runtime libraries, and a suite of additional tools and libraries. The Aurora PE is available in the default environment and is accessible through modules. For example, tools and libraries like cmake, boost, and hdf5 are available in the default environment. 

module load cmake
More details are on the Aurora PE page.

Additional software is installed in /soft and can be accessed by adding /soft/modulefiles to the module search path. 

module use /soft/modulefiles
This will make available a handful of additional software modules, such as kokkos.

Compiling Applications

Users are encouraged to read through the Compiling and Linking Overview page and corresponding pages depending on the target compiler and programming model.

Autotools and cmake are available in the default Aurora PE environment and can be loaded via modules.

$ module load autoconf cmake

Python on Aurora

Frameworks on Aurora can be loaded into a users environment by loading the frameworks module as follows. The conda environment loaded with this module makes available TensorFlow, Horovod, and Pytorch with Intel extensions and optimizations.

module load frameworks

Note that there is a separate Python installation in spack-pe-gcc which is used as a dependency of a number of Spack PE packages. Users will need to exercise caution when loading both frameworks and python from the Spack PE.

Submitting and Running Jobs

Aurora uses the PBSPro job scheduler system. For Aurora-specific job documentation, refer to Running Jobs on Aurora

Getting Assistance

Please direct all questions, requests, and feedback to support@alcf.anl.gov.