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What is Beocat?

Beocat is the HPC cluster at Kansas State University. It is run by the Computing and Information Science department. Beocat is available to any educational researcher in the state of Kansas without cost. Priority access is given to those researchers who have contributed resources.

Beocat is actually comprised of several different cluster computing systems

• "Beocat", as used by most people is a Beowulf cluster of Linux servers coordinated by the SGE job submission and scheduling system. Our Compute Nodes (hardware) and installed software have separate pages on this wiki. The current status of this cluster can be monitored by visiting http://ganglia.beocat.cis.ksu.edu/.
• A comparatively small Hadoop cluster
• A small Openstack cloud-computing infrastructure

How Do I Use Beocat?

First, you need to get an account by visiting https://account.beocat.cis.ksu.edu/ and filling out the form. In most cases approval for the account will be granted in less than one business day, and sometimes much sooner. When your account has been approved, you will be added to our LISTSERV, where we announce any changes, maintenance periods, or other issues.

Once you have an account, you can access Beocat via SSH and can transfer files in or out via SCP or SFTP. If you don't know what those are, please see our LinuxBasics page. If you are familiar with these, connect your client to beocat.cis.ksu.edu and use your K-State eID credentials to login.

As mentioned above, we use SGE for job submission and scheduling. If you've never worked with a batch-queueing system before, submitting a job is different than running on a standalone Linux machine. Please see our SGEBasics page for an introduction on how to submit your first job. If you are already familiar with SGE, we also have an AdvancedSGE page where we can adjust the fine-tuning.

How do I get help?

You're in our support Wiki now, and that's a great place to start! We highly suggest that before you send us email, you visit our FAQ.

If your answer isn't there, you can email us at beocat@cis.ksu.edu. Please send all email to this address and not to any of our staff directly. This will ensure your support request gets entered into our tracker, and will get your questions answered as quickly as possible. Please keep the subject line as descriptive as possible and include any pertinent details to your problem (i.e. job ids, commands run, working directory, program versions,.. etc).

We are also available on IRC on the freenode chat servers in the channel #beocat. Available from a web browser here.

How do I get priority access

We're glad you asked! Contact Dr. Dan Andresen to find out how contributions to Beocat will prioritize your access to Beocat.