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UB Center for Computational Research (CCR)

Center for Computational Research (CCR) is the main supercomputer facility at UB that is available to faculty, staff, and students. CCR provides general computing resources to researchers at UB. Our group also purchased private CPU and GPU nodes at CCR for the exclusive use of our group members. Follow the steps below to get started in CCR! If you come across any problems in this process, feel free to submit a support ticket to the CCR team - they usually respond very quickly.

The following tutorial will give you a quick how-to guide, but if you want to learn CCR in a more systematic way, UB provides free, self-paced course “Intro to CCR” to all faculty, staff, and students.

1). Create a CCR Account

Group members must first create a CCR user account to be able to access CCR resources. Detailed instructions for the creation of the account can be found here.

<aside> 💡 If you are unable to open the IDM website for account creation, please try to open the website in "Incognito window/mode". Or you can try to clean the cache & cookies of your web browser, then you should be able to open it in normal mode. Hopefully CCR will fix this problem later.

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Once you have created your CCR account, send your username to Prof. Shi so that we can grant you access to CCR allocations. Also on the same webpage, follow the instructions there to set up:

VPN access (so that you can access CCR and other UB resources from home 🏠)
Two-factor authentication (required for all CCR users).

2). First-time Login to CCR Cluster

Once you complete the steps above and are granted access to CCR allocations by Prof. Shi, now it’s time for you to log in to the CCR cluster!

You can read more and follow the official UB instructions on this page to get connected to the login node of CCR. Here, I briefly provide my login method (for Windows users):

Open Windows Terminal app (basically search "Terminal" in Windows search bar).
Run the following command, substituting in your email address:
```
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email_address"
```
At the prompt, type a secure passphrase, you will need it later.
Copy the contents of the public key to your clipboard (right click file and open it in the Notepad). The file is located here: C:\\Users\\khshi\\.ssh\\id_ed25519.pub . Note that khshi in the path is my Windows username, you should replace it with your own Windows username.
Login to the CCR IDM portal and click on SSH Keys in the left nav menu.
Click on the "New SSH Key" button, paste the contents of your public key in the text box, and click "Add". After uploading your SSH key to the CCR portal, it will take 20-30 minutes to propagate our systems and allow you to login.
Once you have uploaded your SSH public key to your CCR account, you will be able to use SSH protocol to connect to CCR’s login nodes.

It is possible to directly ssh the login node from the Terminal (Windows/Linux/MacOS). However, I would generally suggest using user-friendly terminal software to connect to the CCR. Two terminal software are recommended: MobaXterm and Xshell/Xftp. Pick either one you like. MobaXterm integrates more functionalities (including file transfer, X11 forward etc.) than Xshell, while Xshell provides a smoother connection experience (Personally, I use Xshell more often).
Here let’s use Xshell as an example, download both Xshell and Xftp (Xftp is for file transfer between your local laptop and CCR supercomputers) HERE.
Once you have installed Xshell, open it and create a new session: