System Status
(a) Lmar
(b) Suwel
There are several problems that require computation power on scales which are generally not available on standalone desktop PCs. As a result, solutions for those problems may consume unnecessarily long times. However, on systems that are designed for such compute intensive tasks, the time spent can be significantly reduced. So if you are attempting such a problem requiring simulations, or training a machine learning problem, or processing an analytics pipeline based on big data, you can use this High Performance Computing (HPC) facility and utilize the available software stacks. The facility is intended to be used for coding & development, and research, and is open to both students and faculty of FAST-NUCES. External access can also be granted for collaborations and linkages.
The HPC facility is powered on Linux and currently based on two high-end machines; Lmar and Suwel, names that represent celestial bodies. Lmar is Pashto for the Sun (also pronounced Nwar), while Suwel is the Pashto adaptation of Arabic Suhail; a name used to identify the second brightest star in the night sky (Canopus in Constellation Carina), and has been used for navigation purposes since ancient times.
The facility was established at FAST NUCES Peshawar campus in summer of 2014 and has undergone one major hardware update in 2019. Some major components were donated by NVIDIA Corporation, manufacturer of NVIDIA based GPU's and research grants from FAST-NUCES. Lmar serves as both a gateway and compute node, while Suwel serves as compute node only.
The facility is intended to be used for coding & development, and research, and is open to both students and faculty.
You cannot use the facility to install & play games. Also, You are not allowed to use the facility as a backup for your files. All files will be purged on a regular basis and it would be your responsibility to keep a backup of your data in order to avoid any inconvenience.
Fire up any shell and type the command:
ssh 121.52.146.108 -l <your_user_id> -XY
Download and run the Putty SSH client from their webpage. Specify Host Name: 121.52.146.108, Port Number: 22, Connection type: SSH, and then click on Open.
Files can be copied from your PC to Lmar using the following scp command:
scp <source destination of files>/* <your_user_id>@121.52.146.108:/home/<your_user_id>/<destination folder>
Likewise, files from Lmar to your PC can be copied using the following command:
scp <your_user_id>@121.52.146.108:/home/<your_user_id>/<source location>/* <destination location>
For Windows, download and run the Windows SCP client from their website. Provide the host name: 121.52.146.108, port: 22, and your username and password. Once logged in, you will see your local files on the left side pane, and your files on Lmar on the right side pane. Rest is just drag and drop.
Dr. Omar Usman Khan, Department of Computer Science, Email: omar.khan@nu.edu.pk (Subject line must include keyword HPC-HELP)