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SURFsara HPC Cloud documentation

We are closely monitoring the service. **It experienced UI unavailability on the 15th Jan. from 16:27 to 17:42 CET.**

This _wiki_ collects the documentation for the **HPC Cloud** at SURFsara. The documentation pages are in constant review and you can expect **frequent changes**. You are welcome to contribute to **help us improve** the documentation (see bottom of this page).

**New to the HPC Cloud service?** We organize [periodic hands-on introductory trainings](https://www.surf.nl/en/agenda/training-surf-systems-for-research/hpc-cloud) where you will acquire the basic knowledge.

**GPU resources overloded** The HPC Cloud service cannot support new projects requesting GPU resources until further notice.

**The HPC Cloud service was phased out on the 31th Mar. 2022.**



TODAY!
[An introduction to SURF HPC Cloud](UvA-20210122)

Operational

• Maintenance calendar HPC Cloud
• Changelog HPC cloud
• Security policy

Basics

• Introduction to HPC Cloud
• Estimate your resources
• User Interface
• General start
• Access your Virtual Machine

Advanced Topics

General

• Customise your Virtual Machine
  • General options
  • Storage options
  • Network options
  • OS Booting options
  • Input/Output options
  • Context options
  • Other options
• Contextualization
• A Virtual Machine from Scratch
  • CentOS using an ISO
• Virtual Machine states
• Sharing OpenNebula Objects
• Install Windows
• User management
• Remote Desktop via XRDP

GPU

• Attaching a GPU to a VM
• Remote GPU visualization

Disk Images

• Image Storage
• Image Persistence
• Extra storage: datablocks
• Scratch Disk Images
• Download an image
• Create an Image on your own laptop
• Create a copy of a disk in a running VM
• Resize your OS image

Security

NOTE:

You are strongly advised to set up your own firewall inside your virtual machines. OpenNebula offers now the so-called Security Groups instead of the old Network filters. However, they do not work in the current implementation, so we are pursuing other ways to provide a form of external firewall.

• Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)
• L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF), a.k.a. Foreshadow
• Installing fail2ban

Inside the VM

• Grid Storage
• NFS – Share Data between Virtual Machines
• SoftDrive

Automation

• Getting started with the XML-RPC API

Apps

• Apps Appliances Configuration

Troubleshooting

• VM "pending" because of VNC port problem
• Recovery access; how to get root access to your VM without a root password
• VM not reacting to Shutdown
• Connection problem with resumed ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine

Tutorials

• HPC Cloud tutorial
• UvA HPC course, HPC Cloud session, 2021-01-22

Service implementation

• Available resources

Contributing to the documentation

If you have any comments, please let us know by sending an e-mail to helpdesk@surfsara.nl. Alternatively, you are welcome to contribute to this documentation directly. You can fork our repository on GitHub and submit a pull request to inform us of your changes.

Please find our contribution guidelines before more information about forking, contributing updates, bug fixes, or other corrections.