How to use the Star-P Software to Parallel Process on the Cranium Cluster

Star-P software allows users performing scientific, engineering or analytical computation on array or matrix-based data to use parallel architectures such as multi-core workstations, multi-processor systems, distributed memory clusters and/or utility/cloud-based environments.

The software delivers users of MatLab and NumPy (Numeric Python) the ability to:

• Transform serial applications for parallel deployment
• Develop and deploy new parallel applications and algorithms

Visit the official Star-P website for more information.

To use the Star-P software: Follow the next steps. As a note, users are required to set public/private SSH authentication keys on the Cranium cluster to use the Star-P client. This allows you to SSH into any LONI machine without the need for passwords. Use this link to configure your authentication keys or send an email to support@loni.ucla.edu for assistance.

• As the software is currently in evaluation, you need to login into one of the Cranium Cluster's compute nodes we configured to run Star-P. This machine is not accessible from all computers in the LONI network, so you need to login into a SSH proxy machine before accessing this compute node.

• SSH into ssh.loni.ucla.edu,

• Now, ssh into cerebro-24-114.data.cluster.loni.ucla.edu,

• Run the command: starpClient (if you don't have /usr/local/bin in your path, then run /usr/local/bin/starpClient). You will have the following output:

• Once, Star-P reserves the needed slots in the cluster to be used during your session, a MatLab prompt will be available for you to run your job(s):

• By typing the qstat command, you can see the number of slots reserved by Star-P to run your parallel MatLab jobs in the Cranium cluster, in this case, 10 slots as shown in your Star-P client configuration file in your home directory.

• Use the MatLab prompt to run your jobs as shown in the following example:

• Please read the Star-P manual. You will need to replace Matlab primitives with Star-P commands to parallelize the execution on Cranium!

--Hugo Hernandez - 16 Sep 2009