Hyak Resources

About Hyak

Hyak is maintained by a team of data scientists in Research Computing, a unit of UWIT, and offers high-performance computing for the UW community. The CBE Dean’s Office and the Office of Research are paying for a Hyak “slice”

For those interested in High-Performance Computing in the college, the College of Built Environments Dean’s Office and Office of Research have covered the cost of a for college faculty and research staff to use to try out the system. Not only does this provide access to our node, but allows faculty/staff to run projects across all of the Hyak infrastructure when those resources are otherwise idle.

You may join the CBE Hyak Mail list to share information/questions.

Support

CBE Hyak Mailman list

You may join our Mailman list for internal communications and questions:

https://mailman11.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/cbe-hyak

Office Hours:

Drop-in, in-person office hours are offered every Thursday 2:00 at the eScience Institute – Physics and Astronomy Building, WRF Data Science Studio (6th floor).
Zoom office hours are offered every Wednesday at 2:00. Email help@uw.edu for a Zoom link.
The Research Computing Club (https://depts.washington.edu/uwrcc/) is a student-led organization that offers office hours to student users once a week.

Technical Support:

CBE-IT is not able to provide assistance with the usage of Hyak. Email help@uw.edu for any questions or concerns.

Onboarding support:

CBE-IT can assist with gaining access to Hyak. Departments and teams should email be-help@uw.edu and reference Hyak in the subject. For students or student teams, an advisor, PI, or other person in authority should make onboarding requests on behalf of their students.

New graphical interface

Beginning in January 2025, Research Computing now offers a graphical web interface for Hyak called Open OnDemand (https://ondemand.hyak.uw.edu/pun/sys/dashboard/) that can simplify many of the tasks that may be complex, repetitive, or require scripting. This new interface offers a file explorer to allow for file upload and download or edit, and a Job Composer to submit jobs for processing. OOD will allow interactive access for apps such as:
- Jupyter
- RStudio
- MATLAB
- VsCode (upcoming)
Virtual desktops are now available, which will allow users to launch processes through a graphical interface rather than via the command line interface.

Research Computing believes that these changes will better enable adoption and use of the platform. It will be easier for individuals without scripting or command line experience to interact with the Hyak service.

Training

Hyak staff will engage with departments or groups for on-site training upon request. Contact Carrie Dossick and Ashlar Trystan if interested.

The Research Computing team will record certain training videos and place them on YouTube. Topics include:

R/Rstudio
Containers
SLURM
Linux Command Line Basics
Deep Learning (upcoming)

Search link: https://www.youtube.com/@uwinfotech/search?query=hyak

Storage

Hyak Storage General Information

Storage solutions are separated into “Hot”, “Warm”, and “Cool” categories.

“Hot” storage is for direct, on-demand, low-latency access and are accessed via Linux command line tools. Data stored in these environments is for immediate access or for when low latency is required.
“Warm” storage is for public sharing or consumption and uses a graphical interface for access.
“Cold” storage is for archival uses and has automatic geographical redundancy. Data stored here is to be held for longer terms and does not require immediate access.

gscratch is “Hot” storage solution and is the built-in storage on Hyak. Data here is not backed up to any location and may be lost at any time after a job has completed.

Kopah is a “Warm” storage solution. Request access by emailing help@uw.edu and mentioning “Kopah” in the subject line.

Lolo is a “Cold” storage solution and is a tape archival system. Data is backed up to a site in Spokane to maintain redundancies.

Note: Some of the storage information after this point is out of date and Ashlar Trystan will provide updates at a later time. Please email help@uw.edu if you have any storage questions and share any information you receive with Ashlar (atrystan@uw.edu).

Local: Each full node has 1.5TB or more of local NVME SSD disk storage. This is non-persistent storage and is cleared after a job ends. Data must be copied to and from local SSD before and after each job to utilize this.

Group: Each slice purchase includes 1 TB of storage space and a 1 million file count limit of shared group storage (i.e., gscratch) accessible from every node. Additional storage quota increases can be purchased for $10 per month for 1TB of additional space and 1 million additional file count limit. Additional “scrubbed” shared storage is available for short-term use, but will be automatically deleted if not accessed for several weeks.

Keep backup copies of anything you need in a separate location (which is a good plan in any case).

This was planned to be a shared resource for the college and for those wishing to check out the system. Access is by UW netID. To request access, send email to cbeit@uw.edu. The details on exactly how to share this resource is a learning curve for us, we are working through those.

UW Hyak resources

UW Hyak Mail list Used for service changes and interruptions. If you use Hyak, sign up.

UW Research Computing Resources

The Research Computing Club Facilitates access to and training for UW’s shared super computing cluster, Hyak, and cloud computing resources that are available to all undergraduate and graduate students. The RC Club provides access to these nodes and training students to use the effectively and responsibly.

The Hyak User Wiki has great information about using the Hyak system (we are on a KLONE node).