Help!

• How do I ask for help?
• Recovering deleted files?
• Understanding your cluster usage costs

How do I ask for help?

Before asking for help please take the time to check that your question hasn't already been answered in our FAQ.

To contact us please send an e-mail to the UNIL Helpdesk at helpdesk@unil.ch starting the subject with DCSR 

From:    user.lambda@unil.ch

To:      helpdesk@unil.ch

Subject: DCSR Cannot run CowMod on Curnagl

Dear DCSR,
I am unable to run the CowMod code on Curnagl - please see job number 1234567 for example.

The error message is "No grass left in field - please move to alpage"

You can find my input in /users/ulambda/CowMod/tests/hay/

To reproduce the issue on the command line the following recipe works (or rather doesn't work)

module load CowMod
cd /users/ulambda/CowMod/tests/hay/
CowMod --input=Feedtest 

Thanks

Dr Lambda

It helps us if you can provide all relevant information including how we can reproduce the problem and a Job ID if you submitted your task via the batch system.

Once we have analysed your problem we will get in touch with you.

Recovering deleted files?

This depends on where the file was and when it was created and deleted.

/scratch

There is no backup and no snapshots so the file is gone forever. 

/users

If it was in your home directory /users/<username>  then you can recover files from up to 7 days ago using the built-in snapshots by navigating to the snapshot directory as follows:

[ulambda@login ~]$ pwd
/users/ulambda

[ulambda@login ~]$ date
Tue Jun  1 13:59:28 CEST 2021

[ulambda@login ~]$ $ cd /users/.snapshots/

[ulambda@login .snapshots]$ ls
2021-05-26  2021-05-27  2021-05-28  2021-05-29  2021-05-30  2021-05-31  2021-06-01

[ulambda@login .snapshots]$ cd 2021-05-31/ulambda

[ulambda@login ]$ pwd
/users/.snapshots/2021-05-31/ulambda

[ulambda@login ]$ ls
..
my_deleted_file_from_yesterday
..
..

 

The snapshots are taken at around 3am in the morning so if you created a file in the morning and deleted it the same afternoon then we can't help.

Beyond 7 days the file is lost forever.

Understanding your cluster usage costs

Checking costs

You can view real-time and daily/weekly/monthly consumption on the billing dashboard (VPN connexion is required).

Only the PI of the project can view its billing page. Other project members should contact their PI for usage/cost details.

Usage is tracked and billed per project, which can be chosen from the dashboard. Each invoice aggregates costs quarterly, based on the consumption of CPU/GPU hours, GB hours, storage, etc.

If unexpected charges are noticed, contact helpdesk@unil.ch, specifying "DCSR" in the subject, before the end of the billing cycle (every quarter).

How billing works

CPU hours, GPU hours and GB hours are tracked and billed independently. Taking into account that 4GB per cpu are free and assuming illustrative rates of 0.005 CHF per CPU hour, 0.3 CHF per GPU hour and 0.0003 CHF per GB hour, we can compute costs.

Resources --cpu or --gpu	Memory --mem (GB)	Duration --time (hours)	Cost
1 cpu	4	1	= 0.005 CHF
1 cpu and 1 gpu	4	1	= 0.005 + 0.3 = 0.305 CHF
8 cpus	64	6	= 48*0.005 + 6*(64-4*8)*0.0003 = 0.2976 CHF
4 cpus and 1 gpu	256	24	= 96*0.005 + 24*0.3 + 24*(256-4*4)*0.0003 = 0.780 + 7.2 + 1.7280 = 9.4080 CHF

Please refer to the billing dashboard for actual rates.