Installation guide for the Euler cluster

Disclaimer: for this to work, you must be an ETH Zurich affiliated person and own a nethz-account.

EULER stands for Erweiterbarer, Umweltfreundlicher, Leistungsfähiger ETH-Rechner. It is a high performance cluster available to users affiliated to the ETH Zurich. See more information about the computing cluster on the clusterwiki.

This section describes the steps necessary to get the CEA running on the Euler cluster.

Logging on to the Euler cluster

Estimated time: 1 hr

You can login to the Euler cluster via the SSH protocol. If you use Linux or Mac OS X, then you can directly use SSH from within a shell as it is part of the operating system. If you are on Windows, you will need an ssh client. The CEA Console includes the ssh command, otherwise, install a third-party application in order to use SSH (Putty, Cygwin, Git for Windows).

You can only log in to Euler from within the ETH network or when connected via VPN.

Once in the terminal in Linux or Mac OS X or in a terminal of thrid-party application of your choicse, do:

ssh <your nethz-name>@euler.ethz.ch

After entering the above command in the shell, you will be asked for a password. Enter your nethz password. You are then greeted with the Euler welcome message.

Detailed steps are described in the Euler wiki of the Scientific Computing Service in ETHZ. For Windows users, it is recomendded to download WinSCP and MobaXterm. Please follow the steps in the wiki carefully, and consult the cluster support when Troubleshooting section (2.9) is not enough to solve your problwm.

Build a CEA Singularity container

Estimated time: 20 mins

You need to build a Singularity container via a cea docker image. The latest docker image of cea is published here. Please login to Euler and conduct the following steps.

  • Request a compute node with Singularity

$ bsub -n 1 -R singularity -R light -Is bash

  • Load eth_proxy to connect to the internet from compute nodes

$ module load eth_proxy

  • Go to the scratch folder

$ cd $SCRATCH

  • Build a Singularity container based on the cea docker image

$ singularity pull docker://cityenergyanalyst/cea

  • Check if Singularity has been built

$ ls

You should find the CEA Singularity container, cea_latest.sif, in the list of files. Congratulations! You can start running CEA on Euler!

  • If wish to run cea test to test the CEA Singularity container:

$ SINGULARITY_HOME=/projects singularity shell -B $SCRATCH cea_latest.sif
Singularity> source /venv/bin/activate
(venv) Singularity> cea test

Running the CEA

You need to run the CEA scripts with their command line interface (CLI). Be sure to learn how to use the job system on Euler, as the login nodes are not intended for running simulations. See clusterwiki.

  • Upload your CEA projects to /cluster/scratch/nethz-username.

  • Upload a workflow.yml to /cluster/scratch/nethz-username.

  • Open workflow.yml, point the project path to /cluster/scratch/ethz-username/PATH_TO_PROJECT (be aware of the linux path format).

  • In the same workflow.yml, specify the steps you wish to simulate. Please refer to this blog post on how to edit workflow.yml.

  • Submit a batch job following this example command:

$ bsub -n 1 -R "span[host=1]" -R singularity -R "rusage[mem=2048,scratch=2048]" -W 1:00 "SINGULARITY_HOME=/projects singularity run -B \$TMPDIR:/tmp -B $SCRATCH cea_latest.sif cea workflow --workflow /cluster/scratch/nethz-username/workflow.yml"

Other Commands

Before building a new singularity container, it is suggested to clean up the folders first.

  • To remove a singularity container (e.g., a container named cea_latest.sif that is in $SCRATCH)

$ cd $SCRATCH
$ rm cea_latest.sif

  • To clean up cache files

$ singularity cache clean