Science Data Challenge 3

Resources per team

• Teams will be given access to Spider, a versatile high-throughput data-processing platform designed for processing large, structured data sets. Spider is a combined CPU and GPU system

• Teams will be granted a maximum of 100,000 CPU core hours

• Limited access to GPUs on request

• 2 TB of persistent storage per team will be available for the duration of the data challenge

Resource Access

• Access to Spider is provided by SSH.

Resource management

• Spider provides extensive monitoring and resource management functionality.

Software management

• Spider provides an extensive range of centrally-managed system software. 

• Users are able to install software in their user or project space, and have it made available across the compute nodes. 

• Spider also supports user software provided in Singularity containers.

Documentation

• Spider User Guide 

Support

• Teams will have access to the SURF Helpdesk.

Resource location

• Spider is hosted at SURF, the Netherlands national e-infrastructure provider.

Overview

• Detailed information about Spider is available from SURF.

Technical specifications

• 10,000+ CPU cores; new hardware regularly being added

• Mix of Intel and AMD

• At least 8 GB RAM and 80 GB scratch space per core

Per user resource

• 100,000 CPU hours available

• 2 TB persistent (for the duration of the challenge) storage per team

Software installed

• A wide range of system software as described in the documentation.

• User software can be directly installed in home and project spaces.

• Singularity containers are supported.

GPUs if any

• Access to Nvidia A100 GPUs on request.

Account Setup

To initiate account creation, please send John Swinbank (swinbank@astron.nl) the following details of each team member:

• First name

• Last name

• E-mail

• Phone

• Nationality

• Specified role, as defined here (optional)

Please refer to the extensive documentation provided by SURF for further information.

• Compute jobs are managed through SLURM.

• Spider provides extensive monitoring and resource tracking capabilities.

• For technical issues, the SURF Helpdesk will provide support as described in the documentation.

• Other queries can be directed to John Swinbank, ASTRON SDC Programme Manager, swinbank@astron.nl.

Publications or data releases should be accompanied by the acknowledgement:

This work made use of the prototype Netherlands SKA Regional Centre, provided by ASTRON and SURF, supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under National Roadmap grant number 184.035.004 (FuSE: Fundamental Sciences E-infrastructure).