http://acesgrid.org/http://acesgrid.org/
Overview
The ACES clusters stands for Alliance for Computational Earth Science (ACES) ad I got access from [greg] by emailing him, and he provided access within 24 hours. This came with an email from the grid system itself with a link to their website with lots of useful information. This includes the times for office hours (Tuesdays from 11:30-1:30) and a list of software.
Information
Their website has some useful information, although it's not perfect. If you have any specific questions, you might find it there.
http://acesgrid.org/getting_started.html
I'll just summarize a few things I am aware of.
Storage
Because we don't have our own Alm lab storage and back-up system, you are only allowed to have access to 1GB on your home drive. Although I think there is quite a lot of memory available on a scratch drive, but it is for short term storage and will be deleted automatically. So this might be a good option when you want to do something which requires a lot of computational power to finish processing something, then you can move it off and store else where. Look at the webpage for specifics.
MatLAB
I was specifically looking for a new way to use Matlab since I was using it on beagle but that went down. This is how to get matlab working with Aces
http://acesgrid.org/matlab.html
However, when I tried to log into geojr.acesgrid.org it didn't let me, so I followed the directions from the above web page with login.acesgrid.org and with -X and that worked. I also had to run it without the '-nojvm' flag when calling matlab.
The non-interface version also works as below:
qsub -I -l nodes=1
module add matlab
matlab
And I imagine that if you wanted to do something else interactively, that the qsub command above would also work.
QIIME
You can also get qiime to work, using the qsub command above to get interactive computing and use:
module add qiime
I haven't used it yet, but at least I loaded it.
Space
So I was able to make my own directory in /data/ and /scratch/, but it didn't exist before I made it:
mkdir /scratch/spacocha
mkdir /data/spacocha
I'm able to write to that folder, so I think it should work fine.
File transfer
Although I can make the /scratch/spacocha folder, I can't scp to it. Instead, I can scp big files, like fastq files, to /data/spacocha/ just fine.
Notes
I have been having trouble getting and interactive node using qsub for a few days. I'm not sure if it's a clogged cluster or a technical problem.
Summary
In summary, this cluster might be good for a few specific tasks, but it's not good for long term storage, and it's geared towards the earth science crowd and modeling ocean circulation etc. It might have some functional capabilities that you could use (i.e. Matlab, QIIME), but be careful not to leave data on their scratch because it will be deleted.