Why writing this blog post Many UIUC students rely on the Delta to access the GPU resources for their research. Delta provides 4 ssh-enabled login nodes, and lots of computing nodes with GPUs. Usually, we must ssh to the login node (by password and DUO 2FA OTP) first, and then use srun to request GPU resources to run our code. However, based on my experience, sometimes we could suffer many problems when using the Delta: ...
Problem Every year before CVPR, GPUs are always in short supply, and we need to borrow cards from elsewhere. USTC provides BitaHub for on-campus users, but it suffers from the same shortage of cards before CVPR. At the same time, its job-submission-based usage model is very inconvenient: submitting jobs that occupy multiple cards often requires a long wait in the queue, and its data management approach is downright user-hostile. As the server administrator for my group, in order to make my life easier before CVPR and to avoid repeating the 2021 pre-CVPR ordeal of scrambling to allocate resources, I needed to improve the BitaHub experience: ...