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.
Partition
For detailed information about job limits and available compute nodes in each
partition, please refer to our Bouchet partition documentation.
Please use devel partition for code development, debugging, and compilation.
Jobs submitted to mpi partitions need to request at least two nodes and are allocated full nodes.
mpi partition
Compared to the existing mpi partition Bouchet provides several key improvements:
- Bouchet MPI nodes are 64-core Emerald Rapids Platinum 8562Y+ nodes, which are several generations newer compared to current Skylake 6136 nodes
- Each compute node in Bouchet has 487GiB of usable RAM, significantly more than the 88GiB/node currently available
- The installed software packages in Bouchet are compiled specifically for the Emerald Rapids architecture to provide optimal performance
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 version of the toolchain 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.