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Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get GPU access?

Currently we have many public GPUs available to the MIT community on Satori and we are working on getting more on Engaging. You can request GPUs for your job by following this documentation.

If your lab would like to purchase GPUs to be hosted on Engaging, please contact orcd-help-engaging@mit.edu.

How do I check the status of my job?

Instructions for checking job status can be found here.

How can I submit a module request?

We are open to creating new modules for the Engaging cluster. You can submit all module requests to orcd-help-engaging@mit.edu.

I am unable to install a package in R. How can I debug the issue?

We recommend using Conda to manage R packages. Please refer to the R user guide.

Can I use export controlled software on the cluster?

Export controlled software has specific requirements around who is allowed to access the software. Often, our clusters do not meet these requirements, so we generally do not allow this software to be on our systems. Please refer to the terms of use of the software and direct any questions to orcd-help@mit.edu.

Can you increase the time limit for my job?

For public partitions on Engaging, such as mit_normal, we cannot increase the time limit for any particular job, as these resources are shared. For jobs that need to run longer than the time limit on the partition, we encourage checkpointing, which is a way of periodically saving progress so that subsequent jobs can pick up where another job left off. The implementation of checkpointing is domain specific and can vary greatly. You can find more information on checkpointing here.

For partitions owned by other groups, please email orcd-help-engaging@mit.edu.

How do I get an account?

If you have an MIT Kerberos account, then you can get an account on Engaging. To register, navigate to the Engaging OnDemand Portal and log in.

If you have an MIT Kerberos account, then you can get an account on Satori. To register, navigate to the Satori Portal and log in.

Access to SuperCloud is more restrictive and the account generation process is more involved. For more information, see the SuperCloud documentation.

How do I install a Python package?

See our documentation on Python.

Why won't my application run on a different partition?

On Engaging, the older nodes (such as the sched_mit_hill and newnodes partitions) run on CentOS 7 while the newer nodes (such as mit_normal and mit_preemptable) run on the Rocky 8 operating system (OS). Each set of nodes has a different set of modules, so if you have set up software to run on one OS, it will probably not work on the other OS.

How do I run Jupyter notebooks?

You can run Jupyter a few different ways:

  1. Web portal for the cluster you're using
  2. VS Code
  3. Port forwarding

See our Jupyter documentation.

Xfce desktop has failed to start. How can I fix this?

This issue is often caused by Conda setup commands existing in your ~/.bashrc file. This happens when you run conda init when using Miniforge or another Anaconda install. We recommend not running conda init as it can lead to errors such as this one.

To fix this, remove or comment out all conda setup commands from your ~/.bashrc file.