Issues with software / applications

How do I set up my account so the modules I always need are loaded automatically?

You can edit the file

~/.bashrc

adding entries at the end of this file to always load the modules you need. If you haven't made any other modifications to this file and you always wish to use gcc version 9.3.0, your .bashrc file would become:

# .bashrc

# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
    . /etc/bashrc
fi

# User specific aliases and functions
module load gcc/9.3.0

I get a message saying "command not found".

This is probably because you haven't loaded the module which sets up your environment correctly for this software. See the Modules page for more information.

Job submission issues

My process was killed.

The login nodes on DIaL3 should not be used for production runs or heavy processing. If the system administrators find the misuse of login nodes for compute intensive tasks, they might decide to kill those jobs without warning.

Please be advised that long running processes should not be launched directly on the login nodes. Instead they should be submitted to the queue using the job scheduler. For further information see the page about Interactive vs Batch jobs and Job types.

My job was killed but there is no output and no errors were reported.

Almost certainly this is because you have not specified a value for vmem, or have a value which is too low. Increase the value requested and resubmit your job.

My job started but only ran for a minute.

It's likely that you've not requested the walltime for a job. This is required to ensure that jobs can be scheduled effectively and that the system can be emptied for service days. If it's not specified, the default value is one minute. There is more information in the page about Submitting Jobs

My job shows as Blocked or Deferred?

Jobs can be placed in the Deferred state for several reasons:

  • You have too much outstanding work (i.e. a large number of running and/or idle jobs)
  • A back-end service was experiencing problems when you submitted your job
  • There is something wrong in your job submission script

In the first two cases you don't need to do anything as the scheduler will re-assess Deferred jobs after an hour to see if the condition that led to them being deferred has gone away. If so, your jobs will be moved to the running or idle state as normal. The command

 $ checkjob -v <jobid>

will give you more information about why a job has been deferred.

How do I acknowledge use of the HPC facilities in research publications?

You can use the following statements to acknowledge the use of DIaL3 as mentioned on Acknowlede DiRAC

This work used the DiRAC Data Intensive service (DIaL2 / DIaL3) at the University of Leicester, managed by the University of Leicester Research Computing Service on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). The DiRAC service at Leicester was funded by BEIS, UKRI and STFC capital funding and STFC operations grants. DiRAC is part of the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure.