Bouchet Getting Started
The Bouchet HPC cluster is YCRC's first installation at Massachusetts High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). Bouchet is the planned successor to both Grace and McCleary, with the majority of HPC infrastructure refreshes and growth deployed at MGHPCC going forward.
Key Differences from Other Clusters
Primary Group
On non-Bouchet clusters, your PI name is the primary group of your account.
On Bouchet, your primary group is your NetID, and secondary groups are assigned for any PI group you belong to.
This setup makes the process of group change easier and can also accommodate
"project"-based secondary groups rather than PI-based secondary groups.
PI groups on Bouchet take the form pi_<netid of the pi>, instead of <lastname of pi> to avoid collisions and confusion between PIs who share a lastname.
Files created in PI-owned project and scratch directories will inherit the correct PI group-ownership.
However, be careful about copying existing files from $HOME to project spaces, as those files may need to have their group ownership updated.
Check Group Membership
If you account was automatically created, we strongly recommend that you check your group membership to make sure it is correct.
To check your filesystem groups, run the command groups.
You will see your netid, followed by your group(s).
To check your Slurm (job) groups, run the command slurm_checkup.sh.
You will see a list of Slurm groups you can submit to using the -A flag as well as which group is your default (the one submitted to if -A is not specified).
If you would like your default Slurm group changed, submit at request to research.computing@yale.edu.
If your group membership is incorrect or incomplete, you can request updates using the Group Change Request Form.
Partitions
For detailed information about job limits and available compute nodes in each partition, please refer to our Bouchet partition documentation.
Storage
Bouchet's filesystem, Roberts, is an all-flash storage system from VAST data and does not have a GPFS filesystem.
/nfs/roberts/ hosts Bouchet's home, project, and scratch directories.
Your project and scratch storage usage and quota are shared with the members of the associated secondary group.
| Storage | Root Directory | Quota | File Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| home | /nfs/roberts/home |
125GiB/user | 500,000 |
| project | /nfs/roberts/project |
4TiB/group | 5,000,000 |
| scratch | /nfs/roberts/scratch |
10TiB/group | 15,000,000 |
Transfer Data from Other Clusters
To transfer data from other clusters to Bouchet, we encourage using Globus.
Applications and Software
Commonly used software is available as modules, similar to other clusters.
Currently, all software is compiled and installed with the 2022b or 2024a versions of the toolchains on Bouchet, even if the same software version is installed with an older toolchain (e.g. 2020b) on other clusters.
If you would like to compile your own code specifically to the Bouchet MPI compute node architecture, you can request an interactive compute session in the devel partition of Bouchet.
Because Bouchet does not have a GPFS filesystem, be sure to turn off any GPFS related optimization configuration.
Report Issues
If you discover issues when running your workflow or experience performance issues, feel free to contact us for assistance. Please include the working directory, the commands that were run, the software modules used, and any more information needed to reproduce the issue.